new york – Macleans.cahttp://www.macleans.ca
Canada's national weekly current affairs magazineSat, 10 Dec 2016 00:57:47 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.2Alleged New York bomber heads for high-profile prosecutionhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/alleged-new-york-bomber-heads-for-high-profile-prosecution/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/alleged-new-york-bomber-heads-for-high-profile-prosecution/#respondWed, 21 Sep 2016 22:02:33 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=927259Prosecution keeps in line with the Justice Department's commitment to use America's civilian court system for terrorism cases

In this Monday, Sept. 19, 2016 file photo, Ahmad Khan Rahami is taken into custody after a shootout with police in Linden, N.J. Rahami, a U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan has been charged by federal officials in two states with planting bombs in New York and at a military charity run and train station in New Jersey. (Nicolaus Czarnecki/The Boston Herald via AP)

WASHINGTON—The federal charges, which portray Ahmad Khan Rahami as a man bent on murderous destruction, set the stage for the most anticipated terror prosecution since the Boston Marathon bombing.

As separate cases wind through federal courts in New Jersey and New York, prosecutors are sure to reveal more about the bombings that injured 31 people in Manhattan and led to Rahami’s capture early Monday morning in a shootout with police. A courtroom airing of those allegations is likely to conjure memories of the attempted Times Square bombing in 2010 and the Boston explosion three years later—unusual incidents in which a defendant was captured alive after an attack was attempted or carried out.

This latest prosecution is in keeping with the Justice Department’s commitment to use America’s civilian court system for terrorism cases.

Though the Obama administration—facing stiff opposition—abandoned its 2009 plan to transfer some Guantanamo Bay detainees to Manhattan federal court for trial, the Justice Department has since cited a series of a high-profile successes—including one in New York against the son-in-law of Osama bin Laden—as proof that the U.S. criminal justice system can secure swift convictions and harsh punishment against terrorism defendants. The military tribunal system, meanwhile, has been snarled by delay.

“No one can point to any example of a civilian criminal prosecution where any of the issues we were worried about actually manifested,” including attacks on a trial or inappropriate disclosures of national security information, said Stephen Vladeck, a national security law professor at the University of Texas. “All of the concerns that have been raised, I think, are belied by the record.”

There have been political calls, including from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, to treat terror suspects like Rahami as enemy combatants, which would deny them certain constitutional rights.

But there’s extremely limited and unsettled precedent for doing that when a defendant is captured on U.S. soil. One 2002 instance involved Jose Padilla, who was first held as an enemy combatant before being prosecuted and convicted in federal court. The Obama administration has time and again expressed its support for the civilian criminal justice system.

“There are lots of different ways for the government to throw the book at Rahami in civilian court,” Vladeck said. “Our post 9-11-criminal counterterrorism regime is not soft.”

Rahami has been hospitalized since his arrest in Linden, New Jersey. He had not spoken with investigators as of Tuesday evening.

Some, Republicans in particular, have complained that warnings against self-incrimination interfere with intelligence gathering. But the Justice Department permits agents to question terror suspects and use their statements, without first advising them of their right to remain silent, when there’s an immediate concern for public safety.

Randall Jackson, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the case against the Times Square bomber and now is in private practice, said investigators are surely hoping Rahami will talk.

“It’s safe to say that in any investigation like this where you’re dealing with an apprehended suspect of this type, every effort will be made to obtain all the useful information you could possibly obtain from that person,” he said.

Though federal charges were lodged against Rahami Tuesday in criminal complaints in both New Jersey and New York, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said Wednesday his office had already arranged for U.S. marshals to bring Rahami to New York for trial.

“We have a good track record of getting it done properly,” Bharara said.

The complaints filed Tuesday were placeholders for more formal grand jury indictments in coming months that may lay out additional details and charges.

If he chooses to face trial, Rahami will follow a notorious roster of men enamoured with militant Islamic teachings brought to a Manhattan courthouse blocks from the World Trade Center. They include six of the men who bombed the trade centre in 1993, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others, and 10 others convicted in 1998 bombings that killed 224 people, including a dozen Americans, at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The courthouse has also hosted numerous other terrorism trials, including those stemming from failed plots to bomb New York City landmarks in 1993 and bring down a dozen U.S. jets over the Far East in 1995.

The current complaints allude to laudatory references in Rahami’s notebook for Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan and for Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric killed in a 2011 drone strike. Prosecutors pressed terrorism-related charges against Rahami, including weapons of mass destruction counts, but the complaints do not tie him to any particular terror group.

“You don’t need to talk about terrorism in most of these prosecutions,” said David Deitch, a former federal counterterror prosecutor. “If this guy planted bombs, he committed a crime regardless of what his motive was.”

Bharara left no doubt about how prosecutors view the case. The evidence, he said, will “show this was a premeditated act of terror.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/alleged-new-york-bomber-heads-for-high-profile-prosecution/feed/0What is known about the New York bomb suspecthttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/what-is-known-about-the-new-york-bomb-suspect/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/what-is-known-about-the-new-york-bomb-suspect/#respondWed, 21 Sep 2016 16:36:41 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=926897Federal court complaints provide chilling glimpse into what authorities say motivated Afghan-born U.S. citizen

FBI officials near the site of an explosion in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York. (Rashid Umar Abbasi/Reuters)

NEW YORK — He bought bomb ingredients on eBay and recorded a mirthful video of himself igniting a blast in a backyard. In a handwritten journal, he warned that bombs would resound in the streets and prayed he’d be martyred rather than caught, authorities say.

Federal court complaints filed Tuesday gave a chilling glimpse into what authorities say motivated the Afghan-born U.S. citizen to set off explosives last weekend in New York City and New Jersey, including a bomb that injured 31 people in Manhattan. The blasts came two years after the FBI looked into him but came up with nothing tying him to terrorism.

Rahami remains hospitalized with gunshot wounds from a shootout with police that led to his capture Monday outside a bar in Linden, New Jersey. It wasn’t immediately clear whether he had a lawyer who could comment on the charges against him, but a federal public defender told a judge Tuesday night that Rahami has not had access to a lawyer since his arrest.

The charges against him include federal terror crimes and state charges of attempting to murder police officers.

Rahami ordered citric acid, ball bearings and electronic igniters on eBay and had them delivered to a Perth Amboy, New Jersey, business where he worked until Sept. 12, the court complaints said. San Jose, California-based eBay Inc. noted that the products are legal and widely available and said the company had worked with law enforcement on the investigation.

Just two days before Saturday’s bombings, a relative’s cellphone recorded Rahami igniting incendiary material in a cylinder buried in a backyard, the fuse being lighted, a loud noise and flames, “followed by billowing smoke and laughter,” the complaints said.

And the complaints said in his bloodied journal — damaged by shots from his gun battle with police — he fumed that the U.S. government was slaughtering Muslim holy warriors and alluded to plans for revenge.

One portion expressed concern at the prospect of being caught before being able to carry out a suicide attack and the desire to be a martyr. Another section included a reference to “pipe bombs” and a “pressure cooker bomb” and declared: “In the streets they plan to run a mile,” an apparent reference to one of the blast sites, a charity run in Seaside Park, New Jersey.

Officers keep watch across the street from United Nations Headquarters Sunday, Sept. 18, 2016, in New York. Security is tightened after an improvised bomb was detonated in a dumpster Saturday night in the Chelsea section of the New York City. (AP Photo/Kevin Hagen)

“The sounds of bombs will be heard in the streets,” the journal declared.

There also were laudatory references to Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki —the American-born Muslim cleric who was killed in a 2011 drone strike and whose preaching has inspired other acts of violence — and Nidal Hasan, the former Army officer who went on a deadly shooting rampage in 2009 at Fort Hood, Texas, the complaints said.

Rahami is accused of setting three bombs, one in Seaside Park, New Jersey, and two in Manhattan. One of the New York City bombs didn’t explode, and the FBI on Wednesday issued a poster showing two men who investigators want to talk to. The agency says the men were seen Saturday night removing the bomb that failed to explode from a piece of luggage, then leaving the device behind while taking the suitcase. Investigators have said the two men are being sought as witnesses, not suspects.

The FBI has said Rahami apparently was not on its radar at the time of the bombing. But he was in 2014, when the FBI opened up an “assessment” — its least intrusive form of inquiry — based on comments from his father after a domestic dispute, the bureau said in a statement.

A law enforcement official said the FBI spoke with Rahami’s father in 2014 after agents learned of his concerns that the son could be a terrorist. During the inquiry, the father backed away from talk of terrorism and told investigators that he simply meant his son was hanging out with the wrong crowd, according to the official, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Rahami’s father, Mohammad, told reporters Tuesday he called the FBI at the time because Rahami “was doing real bad,” having stabbed his brother and hit his mother. Rahami was not prosecuted in the stabbing; a grand jury declined to indict him.

“But they checked, almost two months, and they say, ‘He’s OK, he’s clear, he’s not terrorist.’ Now they say he’s a terrorist,” the father said outside the family’s fried-chicken restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Asked whether he thought his son was a terrorist, he said: “No. And the FBI, they know that.”

The FBI has faced questions before about whether it could have done more ahead of time to determine whether attackers had terrorist aspirations. The issue arose after the Orlando massacre in June, for instance, when FBI Director James Comey said agents a few years earlier had looked into the gunman, Omar Mateen, but did not find enough information to pursue charges or keep him under investigation.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama was confident the bureau would review Rahami’s interactions with law enforcement “to determine if there’s something different that could have been done or should have been done to prevent the violence.”

Meanwhile, investigators are looking into Rahami’s overseas travel, including a visit to Pakistan a few years ago, and want to know whether he received any money or training from extremist organizations.

Rahami’s wife is thought to be a Pakistani national. On a trip to Pakistan in 2014, Rahami emailed his local congressman seeking help because his pregnant wife had an expired passport.

David Duerden, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi, was unable to confirm or deny reports that Rahami’s wife had been questioned in the United Arab Emirates, which is home to a large expatriate Pakistani population and has airports that offer daily flights to Pakistan.

“We’re aware of the reports but don’t have any comment at this time,” he told the AP.

Emirati officials in Dubai and the federal capital Abu Dhabi said they had no information on her.

Federal agents would like to question Rahami. But Rep. Tom MacArthur, R-N.J., who received a classified briefing from the FBI, said Rahami was not co-operating; that could also be a reflection of his injuries.

Rahami, who came to the U.S. as a child, studied criminal justice for a time at a community college, and he worked as an unarmed night guard for two months in 2011 at an AP administrative technology office in Cranbury, New Jersey. At the time, he was employed by Summit Security, a private contractor.

AP global security chief Danny Spriggs said he learned this week that Rahami worked there and often engaged colleagues in long political discussions, expressing sympathy for the Taliban and disdain for U.S. military action in Afghanistan. Rahami left that job in 2011 because he wanted to take a trip to Afghanistan, Spriggs said.

AP spokesman Paul Colford said the news co-operative told law enforcement officials about Rahami’s work at the Cranbury facility.

Summit’s vice-president of security services, Daniel Sepulveda, said Rahami last worked for the company in 2011. Sepulveda said he was unaware of any complaints about Rahami’s conduct.

Ahmad Khan Rahami provided investigators with a wealth of clues that led to his arrest about 50 hours after the first explosion, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation.

His fingerprints and DNA were found at the scene of the Manhattan bombing, they said. His uncovered face was clearly captured by surveillance cameras near the spot of the blast.

Electronic toll records showed a car to which he had access was driven from New Jersey to Manhattan and back to New Jersey the day of the bombing, according to the officials, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss an ongoing case.

Those and other clues spurred officials to publicize his name and photo Monday morning, asking for help finding Rahami, 28, a U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan, who lives with his Muslim family in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Hours later, a police officer in Linden, New Jersey, recognized Rahami after finding him sleeping in a doorway, prompting a confrontation and shootout that led to his capture.

“A lot of technology involved in this, but a lot of good, old-fashioned police work, too,” said New York Police Commissioner James O’Neill. He said now, investigators would “make sure that we get to the bottom of who’s involved and why.”

After surgery for a gunshot wound to his leg, Rahami was being held on $5.2 million bail, charged with five counts of attempted murder of police officers. Federal prosecutors said they still were weighing charges over the bombings. Rahami remains hospitalized.

With Rahami’s arrest, officials said they have no other suspects at large, but cautioned they are still investigating.

Messages left for family members were not immediately returned. It wasn’t clear when Rahami would get an attorney.

The bombing spread fear across the New York area and revived anxiety about homegrown terrorism nationwide.

As the East Coast was rattled by the bombings, a man who authorities say referred to Allah wounded nine people in a stabbing rampage at a Minnesota mall Saturday before being shot to death by an off-duty police officer. Authorities are investigating the stabbings as a possible terrorist attack but have not drawn any connection between the bloodshed there and the bombings.

William Sweeney Jr., the FBI’s assistant director in New York, said there was no indication so far that the bombings were the work of a larger terror cell.

Rahami wasn’t on any terror or no-fly watch lists, though he had been interviewed for immigration purposes travelling between the U.S. and Afghanistan, one of the law enforcement officials said.

Rahami and his family live above their fried-chicken restaurant — called First American Fried Chicken — and the family has clashed with the city over closing times and noise complaints, which the Rahamis said in a lawsuit were tinged with anti-Muslim sentiment.

Officers keep watch across the street from United Nations Headquarters Sunday, Sept. 18, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Kevin Hagen)

The lawsuit was terminated in 2012 because one of Rahami’s brothers had pleaded guilty to blocking police from enforcing closing hours at the restaurant.

A childhood friend, Flee Jones, said Rahami had become more religious after returning from a trip to Afghanistan several years ago. Still, some of the family restaurant’s customers said Rahami was more likely to talk about his interest in cars than to mention faith.

Late Sunday night, five explosive devices were discovered in a trash can at an Elizabeth train station, about 3 miles from where Rahami was later found asleep in the doorway of a bar.

Investigators are still gathering evidence and have not publicly tied Rahami to those devices, though Sweeney noted they aren’t “ruling anything out.”

The bombs discovered Saturday all used flip cellphones as a trigger and were all made with easily purchasable materials, a federal law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity said.

After zeroing in on Rahami and learning of the car that had travelled between New Jersey and New York, authorities pulled it over Sunday night after it headed in the direction of Kennedy airport. The law enforcement officials said at least one of Rahami’s relatives was in the car.

All five were questioned and released, Sweeney said. He declined to say whether they might later face charges.

Linden Mayor Derek Armstead said the break in the case came Monday morning, when a bar owner reported someone asleep in his doorway.

An officer arrived and confronted Rahami, who pulled a gun and fired, authorities said. The officer was saved by his bulletproof vest. More officers joined in a battle that spilled into the street.

Another police officer was grazed by a bullet. The officers’ injuries weren’t life-threatening.

Around the time Rahami was captured, President Barack Obama was in New York on a previously scheduled visit for a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. He called on Americans to show the world “we will never give in to fear.”

Officers keep watch across the street from United Nations Headquarters in New York. (Kevin Hagen, AP)

NEW YORK — Authorities are looking for a naturalized Afghanistan citizen for questioning in a weekend explosion in a Manhattan neighbourhood that injured 29 people as the governor conceded Monday that investigators could no longer rule out international terrorism.

The man sought for questioning was identified as 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami. Mayor Bill de Blasio said he could be armed and dangerous.

“We need to get this guy in right away,” de Blasio said on CNN. “My experience is one the FBI zeroes in on someone, they will get them.”

Cuomo had said Sunday that there was no evidence to suggest that the bombing was related to international terrorism, but he appeared to walk that back Monday.

“Today’s information suggests it may be foreign related, but we’ll see where it goes,” he said.

Authorities were still working to determine whether there is a connection between multiple explosive devices found over the weekend in two states: the Manhattan explosion, an unexploded pressure cooker device blocks away, a pipe bomb blast at a Jersey shore town and five explosive devices at a New Jersey train station.

On Sunday night, FBI agents in Brooklyn stopped “a vehicle of interest” in the investigation of the Manhattan explosion, according to FBI spokeswoman Kelly Langmesser.

She wouldn’t provide further details, but a government official and a law enforcement official who were briefed on the investigation told The Associated Press that five people in the car were being questioned at an FBI building in Manhattan.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the ongoing investigation.

No one has been charged with any crime, and the investigation is continuing, Langmesser said.

Cuomo, touring the site of Saturday’s blast that injured 29 people in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighbourhood, said the unexploded pressure cooker device appeared “similar in design” to the bomb that exploded in Chelsea, but he didn’t provide details.

On Sunday, a federal law enforcement official said the Chelsea bomb contained a residue of Tannerite, an explosive often used for target practice that can be picked up in many sporting goods stores. The discovery of Tannerite may be important as authorities probe whether the two New York City devices and the pipe bomb at the Jersey shore are connected.

Cellphones were discovered at the site of both bombings, but no Tannerite residue was identified in the New Jersey bomb remnants, in which a black powder was detected, said the official, who wasn’t authorized to comment on an ongoing investigation and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

The pipe bomb exploded Saturday in Seaside Park, New Jersey, before a charity 5K race to benefit Marines and sailors. The race was cancelled and no one was injured.

Late Sunday, five suspicious devices were found near a train station in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Elizabeth Mayor Christian Bollwage said the devices were found in a bag in a trash can by two men who reported seeing wires and a pipe coming out of the package. One of the devices exploded as a bomb squad used a robot to try to disarm it. No injuries were reported.

There was no immediate word on whether the devices were similar to those in nearby Seaside Park or New York City.

Officials haven’t revealed any details about the makeup of the pressure cooker device, except to say it had wires and a cellphone attached to it. On Sunday night, police blew up the device, rendering it safe. A forensic examination of the device will be sent to the FBI Laboratory at Quantico, Virginia, police said.

Homemade pressure cooker bombs were used in the Boston Marathon attacks in 2013 that killed three people and injured more than 260.

On Sunday, a team of five FBI agents searched an Uber driver’s vehicle that had been damaged in the Manhattan blast. The driver had just picked up three passengers and was driving when the explosion occurred, shattering the car’s windows and leaving gaping holes in the rear passenger-side door.

The Chelsea explosion left many rattled in a city that had marked the 15th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks only a week earlier and that was schedule to hold a United Nations meeting Monday to address the refugee crisis in Syria.

Witnesses described a deafening blast that shattered storefront windows and injured bystanders with shrapnel in the mostly residential neighbourhood on the city’s west side.

One New Yorker, Anthony Stanhope, was in his apartment when the blast went off. At first he thought it was thunder and lightning.

“Then all of a sudden, car horns went off, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this isn’t lightning. This is too loud,” Stanhope said. “This is a bomb.”

___

By Jake Pearson and Alicia Caldwell. Caldwell reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Karen Matthews, Maria Sanminiatelli, Michael Balsamo and Dake Kang in New York and Eric Tucker and Kevin Freking in Washington contributed to this report.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/new-york-mayor-on-ahmad-khan-rahami-we-need-to-get-this-guy/feed/1New York investigators probe blast that injured 29http://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/new-york-investigators-probe-blast-that-injured-29/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/new-york-investigators-probe-blast-that-injured-29/#respondMon, 19 Sep 2016 00:07:00 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=926083New York Mayor Bill de Blasio: 'We're going to be very careful and patient to get to the full truth here'

]]>NEW YORK — The bomb that rocked a New York City neighbourhood known for its vibrant arts scene and large gay community contained residue of an explosive often used for target practice that can be picked up in many sporting goods stores, a federal law enforcement official said Sunday, as authorities tried to unravel who planted the device and why.

The discovery of Tannerite in materials recovered from the Saturday night explosion that injured 29 people may be important as authorities probe whether the blast was connected to an unexploded pressure-cooker device found by state troopers just blocks away, as well as a pipe bomb blast in a New Jersey shore town earlier in the day.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, touring the site of the blast in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighbourhood, said there didn’t appear to be any link to international terrorism. He said the second device appeared “similar in design” to the first, but did not provide details.

“We’re going to be very careful and patient to get to the full truth here,” New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, said Sunday. “We have more work to do to be able to say what kind of motivation was behind this. Was it a political motivation? A personal motivation? What was it? We do not know that yet.”

Cellphones were discovered at the site of both bombings, but no Tannerite residue was identified in the New Jersey bomb remnants, in which a black powder was detected, said the official, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to comment on an ongoing investigation.

Authorities said the Manhattan bombing and the blast 11 hours earlier at the site of a 5K race to benefit Marines and sailors in Seaside Park, New Jersey, didn’t appear to be connected, though they weren’t ruling anything out. The New Jersey race was cancelled and no one was injured.

Officials haven’t revealed any details about the makeup of the pressure-cooker device, except to say it had wires and a cellphone attached to it.

Technicians in Quantico, Virginia, were examining evidence from the Manhattan bombing, described by witnesses as a deafening blast that shattered storefront windows and injured bystanders with shrapnel in the mostly residential neighbourhood on the city’s west side. All 29 of the injured people were released from the hospital by Sunday afternoon.

The explosion left many rattled in a city that had marked the 15th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks only a week earlier and where a United Nations meeting to address the refugee crisis in Syria was scheduled on Monday.

“People didn’t know what was going on, and that’s what was scary,” said Anthony Zayas, an actor who was in the Chelsea neighbourhood Saturday night when the bomb went off. “You didn’t know if was coming from the subway beneath you, you didn’t know if there were other bombs, you didn’t know where to go.”

Tannerite, which is often used in target practice to mark a shot with a cloud of smoke and small explosion, is legal to purchase and can be found in many sporting goods stores. Experts said a large amount would be required to create a blast like the one Saturday night, as well as an accelerant or other ignitor.

Police and federal spokespeople wouldn’t comment on the presence of explosive material recovered at the scene.

The bomb in Manhattan appeared to have been placed near a large dumpster in front of a building undergoing construction, another law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation, told the AP. The second device, described by the same official as a pressure cooker with wires and a cellphone attached to it, was removed early Sunday by a bomb squad robot and New York City police were preparing to blow it up in a controlled explosion later in the day, authorities said.

Homemade pressure cooker bombs were used in the Boston Marathon attacks in 2013 that killed three people and injured more than 260.

Officials solicited tips from the public, telling reporters at a news conference in the New York Police Department’s headquarters that they didn’t know who set off the bomb or why.

An additional 1,000 state troopers and members of the National Guard were placed at transit hubs and other points throughout New York City and extra police officials were patrolling Manhattan, officials said. Members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force were investigating the blast along with New York Police Department detectives, fire marshals and other federal investigators.

Meanwhile, a law enforcement official said federal investigators had discounted a claim of responsibility on the social blogging service Tumblr. Investigators looked into it and didn’t consider it relevant to the case, said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Anthony Stanhope, 40, a songwriter who lives a block away from the bombing, said he needed more answers before he could feel safe.

“I think it’s terrorism — I don’t know what kind. It’s some kind of fanaticism, I don’t know exactly what it is,” he said. “But somebody has an agenda to cause trouble in this country.”

NEW YORK — An explosion rocked a crowded Manhattan neighbourhood and injured 29 people, and a suspicious device discovered blocks away was safely removed early Sunday. Mayor Bill de Blasio ruled out any terror connections but called the blast an “intentional act.”

“Tonight, New York City experienced a very bad incident,” de Blasio said at a news conference near the scene in Chelsea. “We have no credible and specific threat at this moment.”

De Blasio tried to calm any fears among nervous New Yorkers, saying the explosion had no terrorist connection and wasn’t related to a pipe bomb explosion earlier Saturday in New Jersey that forced the cancellation of a charity run.

“Now, I want to be clear: Whatever the cause, whatever the intention here, New Yorkers will not be intimidated,” the mayor said. “We are not going to let anyone change who we are or how we go about our lives.”

It was unclear who was behind the blast and what motivated it.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that a second device that officers investigated four blocks from the scene appeared to be a pressure cooker attached to wiring and a cellphone. The official, who was not authorized to speak about an ongoing investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the device was found inside a plastic bag on West 27th Street. The device was removed with a robot and taken to a department firing range in the Bronx.

The law enforcement official also said that the explosion that rocked a bustling Chelsea neighbourhood appeared to have come from a construction toolbox in front of a building. Photos from the scene show a twisted and crumpled black metal box.

The blast happened on West 23rd Street, in front of a residence for the blind, near a major thoroughfare with many restaurants and a Trader Joe’s supermarket. Witnesses said the explosion at about 8:30 p.m. blew out the windows of businesses and scattered debris in the area. Officials said no evacuations were necessary.

The Fire Department of New York said 24 people were taken to hospitals with injuries. One person received a puncture wound that was considered serious. The other injuries were described as scrapes and bruises.

New York City subway routes were affected by the explosion, which rattled some New Yorkers and visitors on the heels of the 15th anniversary of the 9-11 terror attacks.

Chris Gonzalez, visiting from Dallas, was having dinner with friends at a restaurant in the area.

Rudy Alcide, a bouncer at Vanity Nightclub at 21st Street and 6th Avenue, said he, at first, thought something large had fallen.

“It was an extremely loud noise. Everything was shaking, the windows were shaking,” he said. “It was extremely loud, almost like thunder but louder.”

The FBI and Homeland Security officials, along with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives arson and explosive task force, were at the scene.

The White House said President Barack Obama was apprised of the explosion.

In St. Cloud, Minnesota, police said at least eight people were injured at a shopping mall Saturday evening in a stabbing attack. The suspect was shot dead by an off-duty police officer.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said she had been briefed “about the bombings in New York and New Jersey and the attack in Minnesota.”

She says the nation needs to support its first responders and “pray for the victims.”

“We have to let this investigation unfold,” she said.

Donald Trump moved ahead of New York City officials when he declared a “bomb went off” before officials had released details. He made the announcement minutes after stepping off his plane in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“I must tell you that just before I got off the plane a bomb went off in New York and nobody knows what’s going on,” Trump said.

He continued, “But boy we are living in a time — we better get very tough, folks. We better get very, very tough. It’s a terrible thing that’s going on in our world, in our country and we are going to get tough and smart and vigilant.”

The Republican presidential nominee made the comments around 9:10 p.m., shortly after the explosion and as emergency officials responded to the blast. A spokeswoman for Trump did not respond to an email asking whether he was briefed about it before taking the stage.

The Manhattan blast came hours after a pipe bomb exploded in Seaside Park, New Jersey, shortly before thousands of runners were due to participate in a charity 5K race to benefit Marines and sailors. The run was cancelled, and no injuries were reported.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/possible-explosion-reported-in-nycs-chelsea-neighbourhood/feed/10Warning to New York tourists: Beware hostile ‘monks’http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/warning-to-new-york-tourists-beware-hostile-monks/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/warning-to-new-york-tourists-beware-hostile-monks/#respondMon, 27 Jun 2016 11:11:06 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=892889Men in orange robes first appeared at the High Line, a New York City public park

In this June 23, 2016 photo, a man who says he is a Buddhist monk hands a medallion to a woman as he solicits donations on New York City’s Times Square. (Michael Balsamo, AP)

New York City Buddhist leaders are sounding the alarm to tourists: Beware the “fake monks.”

Men in orange robes claiming to be Buddhist monks are approaching visitors to some of the city’s most popular attractions, handing them shiny medallions and offering greetings of peace. They then hit them up for donations to help them build a temple in Thailand, and are persistent if their demands are refused.

“The problem seems to be increasing,” said the Rev. TK Nakagaki, president of the Buddhist Council of New York, a group that represents nearly two dozen Buddhist temples. “They are very aggressive and hostile if you don’t give them money.”

His group has taken to the streets and social media to warn people that the men appear to have no affiliation to any Buddhist temple. “Please be aware,” read one Facebook post, “this is a scam.”

Along the popular High Line elevated park, one of the robed men handed a couple a shiny, gold-colored medallion and a plastic beaded bracelet. He then showed them photos of a planned temple and barked, “Ten dollars! Twenty dollars!” When they wouldn’t give up cash, he snatched the trinkets back.

Other brightly robed men have been spotted pulling the same routine, albeit more successfully, in Times Square, not far from where costumed characters such as Elmo, Minnie Mouse and the Naked Cowboy take pictures with tourists for tips. Some of the monks were later seen handing wads of cash to another man waiting nearby.

The Associated Press tried to ask more than half-dozen of the men about their background and the temple they said the donations were being used to support. Each claimed to be a Buddhist monk collecting money for a temple in Thailand, but none could give its name or say where exactly it is located. All the men refused to give their names and ran off when pressed for answers.

The men first started appearing at the High Line, a New York City public park that’s maintained by a private non-profit group, about three years ago, said Robert Hammond, executive director of Friends of the High Line. But it “became excessive” in the past year, he said, with up to a dozen of the men accosting tourists at once and sometimes grabbing them to demand cash.

Panhandling on city streets isn’t illegal in New York, as long as the person isn’t acting aggressively. But the city’s parks department has a rule that says it is unlawful to solicit money without a permit from the parks commissioner.

When asked about the men, New York City Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver initially said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He later said that if the men aren’t abiding by the law, “the parks enforcement patrol will take care of it.”

But parks department spokeswoman Crystal Howard said parks enforcement officers hadn’t issued any summonses and the men’s actions were “aggressive panhandling,” a violation of state law that would be enforced by police. New York City police say that in the rare cases when someone has called 911 against the men, they were usually gone by the time officers arrived.

A few days after the AP inquired about the men on the High Line, several signs were posted there with photos of them, warning visitors not to give money to panhandlers.

Similarly robed men have been spotted in San Francisco, asking tourists to sign their “peace petition” before demanding cash. In China, authorities said the problem of “fake” monks begging in the streets prompted them to create an online registry of all actual Buddhist and Taoist sites.

In Times Square, the warnings came too late for tourist Rob Cardillo, of Pennsylvania. He gave a robed man $10 to help out with his temple, without ever asking anything about the temple or what the money would be used for.

“He might be fake, but it’s the thought and I feel it,” Cardillo said as he gripped the gold medallion.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/warning-to-new-york-tourists-beware-hostile-monks/feed/0Photo gallery: Justin Trudeau boxes in Brooklynhttp://www.macleans.ca/multimedia/photo/photo-gallery-justin-trudeau-boxes-in-brooklyn/
http://www.macleans.ca/multimedia/photo/photo-gallery-justin-trudeau-boxes-in-brooklyn/#commentsThu, 21 Apr 2016 22:00:28 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=863655For the record, the PM is in New York for a signing ceremony of the Paris climate agreement at the UN

Trudeau in NYC

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (left) spars with Yuri Foreman (right) during a workout at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn, New York, USA, 21 April 2016. Trudeau is in New York to participate in the formal signing of the Paris climate agreement on 22 April at the United Nations. Trudeau was at the gym to train with kids from the "Give A Kid A Dream" program that works to provide mentorship to disadvantaged youth through the sport of boxing.

NEW YORK — Justin Trudeau went boxing in New York City on Thursday — metaphorically sparring with students before doing the real thing in a famous Brooklyn gym.

The prime minister held a question-and-answer session at New York University where some queries packed a punch. One student asked how he could justify backing new oil pipelines after campaigning on climate change.

The prime minister replied that he was very explicit before the election, noting he backed the now-cancelled Keystone XL project and didn’t actually campaign against the fossil-fuel industry.

Halting fossil fuel development is “a simplistic solution that can be very appealing,” Trudeau said.

“If it does then involve everyone leaving their car at home, and everyone stopping to use fossil fuels tomorrow, our world would come to a crashing halt. So we have to be a lot more thoughtful and reasonable.”

His political opponents were throwing their own jabs, using the daily question period in the Commons to dismiss the prime minister’s decision to “fly to New York and work out in front of TV cameras,” in the words of Conservative interim leader Rona Ambrose.

Nearly half the students at the forum were Canadian — including one young man in a red Maple Leaf-emblazoned hockey jersey who asked Trudeau about Lester Pearson’s peacekeeping legacy.

Trudeau replied that one reason Canada had the international clout to shape the creation of the United Nations and the design of its peacekeeping system was that it had previously fought in conventional wars.

How did the students react? They applauded warmly — even if they found some of his answers a bit light on detail.

“This was a good introduction,” said Sundus Nasir, a first-year dentistry student originally from Toronto. “There wasn’t a lot of specifics …. Just that he’s here, to engage in a dialogue, I think that’s an important step.”

She said expectations for Trudeau are high. Nasir said he’s well-known abroad — her friends, for example, saw the recent video of him talking about quantum computing.

Trudeau slid on the boxing gloves later Thursday for another viral-video moment.

He jabbed for the cameras at the legendary Gleason’s Gym, where champions Muhammad Ali, Jake (Raging Bull) LaMotta and Mike Tyson trained, albeit in the gym’s previous locations.

The regulars all have their favourite stories about famous boxers who drop in to the gym near the Brooklyn Bridge. Tyson still swings by. Ali wandered in a few years ago.

The gym owner received a phone call last week asking if the prime minister could train there. He agreed — and contacted Frosso Adamakos, a Canadian-raised doctor he knows, to stand ringside lest the photo op go horribly wrong.

Trudeau sparred with former WBA super welter weight champion Israeli Yuri Foreman. They also trained with some kids participating in a youth program.

He arrived in New York a day early for Friday’s signing ceremony of the global Paris climate agreement at the United Nations.

It’s the prime minister’s fourth trip to the U.S. since last month, including stops at a White House state dinner, a nuclear arms-control summit and meetings at the UN after announcing Canada’s bid for a seat on the security council. But a fifth U.S. visit this spring is not in the cards.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/multimedia/photo/photo-gallery-justin-trudeau-boxes-in-brooklyn/feed/10Trudeau in NYC for climate deal, Q and A, and boxinghttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/trudeau-in-nyc-for-climate-deal-q-and-a-and-boxing/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/trudeau-in-nyc-for-climate-deal-q-and-a-and-boxing/#commentsThu, 21 Apr 2016 10:55:00 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=863225Prime Minister will head to New York University today before heading to Gleason's Gym

Trudeau in NYC

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (left) spars with Yuri Foreman (right) during a workout at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn, New York, USA, 21 April 2016. Trudeau is in New York to participate in the formal signing of the Paris climate agreement on 22 April at the United Nations. Trudeau was at the gym to train with kids from the "Give A Kid A Dream" program that works to provide mentorship to disadvantaged youth through the sport of boxing.

NEW YORK – Justin Trudeau is attending a series of events in New York City — ranging from the formal to the decidedly informal.

The prime minister is in town to sign the Paris climate-change agreement tomorrow.

He’s arriving a day early and has several events planned today.

There’s a question-and-answer session with students at New York University this morning, meetings, and a photo-op in a gym where he’ll be boxing.

Trudeau will be jabbing for the cameras at the legendary Gleason’s Gym — where champions Muhammad Ali, Jake (Raging Bull) LaMotta and Mike Tyson trained, albeit in the gym’s previous locations.

This is the prime minister’s fourth trip to the U.S. since last month: he’s also been hosted at a White House state dinner, attended a nuclear arms-control summit and attended meetings at the United Nations.

A collapsed crane lies on the street on Friday, Feb. 5, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

NEW YORK —One person died and two others were seriously injured when a crane collapsed Friday morning in Lower Manhattan, smashing the roofs of parked cars, authorities said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said the crane was being lowered as a precaution because of high winds when the accident occurred.

The crane landed across an intersection and stretched much of a block in the Tribeca neighbourhood, about 10 blocks north of the World Trade Center. There was damage to the roof of a nearby building, and debris littered the street.

“It was right outside my window,” said Robert Harold, who works at the Legal Aid Society. “It was a crashing sound. You could feel the vibration in the building.”

Harold said at least one person was trapped in a car, and he saw onlookers trying to get the person out. Harold said he also saw a person lying motionless on the street.

De Blasio said the person killed was sitting in a parked car. The mayor said none of the injuries appeared to be life-threatening.

Nearby buildings were evacuated. Officers told people arriving for work that they should go home.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/1-dead-2-seriously-hurt-in-manhattan-crane-collapse/feed/0New York City police say drone hits Empire State Buildinghttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/new-york-city-police-say-drone-hits-empire-state-building/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/new-york-city-police-say-drone-hits-empire-state-building/#respondFri, 05 Feb 2016 13:04:12 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=830917Police say the 29-year-old man went to the Manhattan building's security to request his drone back

I knew The Mikado would eventually be off-limits. Gilbert and Sullivan’s most popular operetta is set in a sort of theme-park version of Japanese culture. The concept of the play is that it has superficial authenticity in settings and costumes, but the story and characters have nothing to do with Japan at all. Much as science fiction would use other planets for allegories about the author’s own country, Japan in The Mikado is an allegory for England — because to an Englishman of 1885, Japan might just as well have been another planet.

For those who don’t see the allegory, the sight of a Japan where people are beheaded for flirting and women “do not arrive at years of discretion until they are 50” must seem pretty nasty, but even if you do see the allegory, there’s plenty in there that was going to work against it in a changing culture. It’s rooted in 19th-century exoticism, where Europeans gawked at theme-park versions of cultures they didn’t want to understand; it’s got the childish, albeit universal, urge to make up mocking versions of foreign names (“Titipu,” “Yum-Yum,” “Nanki-Poo”), and above all, it calls for a white company of actors to be made up and costumed as Japanese people.

Well, since 19th-century theatre style and cultural appropriation are linked, at least whenever a 19th-century work ventures out of the home country, it was only a matter of time before this caught up with the NYGASP. This year it finally happened. A playwright in New York, Leah Nanako Winkler, saw the flyer for the show, where the actors were wearing the “traditional” (19th century influenced) costumes and makeup.

Winkler called the company’s artistic director, Albert Bergeret, three times. Her first question was how many people of Asian descent were in the show (only two, and, as Bergeret explained, they’re a repertory company where a few people do all the parts in different shows). The second time, she called him to inform him that “I’m looking at the flyer and it’s yellowface,” and when he began to say that maybe the flyer doesn’t reflect what people see in the show:

Anyway, you know how it goes from there (but here’s the New York Times report to make it simpler). The Twitter hashtag, the “20K plus people who saw the alert and took action in such a passionate, loud, united way that couldn’t be ignored.” The company first announced they would do the show without makeup, then cancelled the thing altogether with an apology and an announcement that they would rethink the play in the future. Which of course is their right (though to say this is not “censorship” implies that only the government can censor or oppress, something only hard-core libertarians believe; calling for something to be censored isn’t always wrong, that’s all).

There was a similar controversy in Seattle last year, so Bergeret should have been prepared for something like this, and perhaps his fear of media attention is evidence that he was prepared for it, but didn’t know how to deal with it. He may have assumed that the company would benefit from a grandfather clause, given that they’re an old company doing an old play in an old-fashioned style, and should not be judged by the same standards as a company putting on a new play. Plus of course the show is not really about Japan, as G&S fans tirelessly (and tiresomely) explain, and can be distinguished from shows that actually try to convince the audience that this is what Japan is like. Or it might be that he’s just clueless about the effect of his productions, which don’t have a high artistic reputation.

But the cultural assumption is increasingly that a white actor playing a Japanese character, with or without makeup, is always unacceptable. And even if The Mikado had an all-Japanese cast, as it does when it’s performed (successfully) in Japan, it would still be a work of 19th-century exoticism, or at least a gentle parody of such works. If this is considered an unambiguously bad thing, and increasingly it is, then there is no way to do The Mikado outside of a revisionist production (and even there, some would argue that white people writing about Japan is just unsalvageable in any way). Those who have enjoyed the show as an allegory for England, and a satire of the universal tendency to imagine that all cultures are just like us, are out of luck.

Well, boo-hoo, the response might go. A few people can’t enjoy the bad thing that was all their own. Well, yes. The NYGASP’s audience has had something taken away from them that they enjoyed; this is not a change being made because of audience response. (The D’Oyly Carte company changed the play’s two instances of the “n-word” in the 1950s. When Gilbert wrote it, he was referring to white performers in blackface, but it played very differently to 1950s audiences, especially in America.) But it was rejected by people who had no intention of going to see it, based primarily on a flyer that — as the artistic director was trying to explain before he was cut off — didn’t represent how the show is experienced. This is not like the Confederate flag on government property, where people have to look at it whether they want to or not; this is a classic “if you don’t like it, don’t see it” situation.

So the idea is that even if people who don’t like the flyer don’t see the show, it does harm by perpetuating bad traditions and unequal power relationships. American Theatre‘s Diep Tran wrote:

The message sent to people of color by productions like an unreconstructed yellowface staging of The Mikado or Cry, Trojans! is basically: “You are not important enough to be respected. You don’t deserve a voice onstage. You are nothing but objects to us.”

That’s certainly a fair point. Everyone’s experience is different, and one of the irritating things about some Gilbert and Sullivan fans is their tendency to point out the allegory of the show as proof that the show is objectively non-racist, and that anyone who experiences it differently is wrong.

A person of Japanese descent is inherently an expert on one thing that I will never truly understand: how it feels to be a person of Japanese descent watching white people play-act at being Japanese. Given that fact, it’s rude to explain to people that they’re wrong to be “offended” by the representation of their culture, but that happens all the time, especially online. Someone’s personal experience is not something to be questioned or second-guessed; all we can do is learn from it.

(For example, a woman recently told me that she had always found the “Three Little Maids” song to be sexist, ever since she was was a little girl. It had never occurred to me before, and still really doesn’t, but I don’t know how the sight of three modern women acting like giggling Victorian schoolgirls comes off to a woman, and it’s not for me to tell her how she should feel.)

But when the argument shifts to the question of what is acceptable to put on the stage today, then it shifts from personal experience to questions like whether art hurts society by perpetuating negative stereotypes, and whether the cultural appropriation involved in the creation of The Mikado is benign or harmful or somewhere in between. None of the people pushing against this production are experts on these matters.

Which doesn’t mean they’re not right, just that personal experience does not automatically translate into authority on anything except your own experience. It’s wrong to question a black person’s reaction to that word in Huckleberry Finn; when discussion shifts to whether the word is artistically necessary, the premises are different, and more disagreement is possible. And discussions of The Mikado are based on things on which there is no “authoritative” answer; even the question of “yellowface” depends on what definition you’re using. But the current mentality online is summed up by the end of a popular Tumblr cartoon about white privilege: if you educate yourself, you will agree with the speaker, and if you don’t agree, you haven’t educated yourself enough. People who say they want a “conversation” often don’t really want it.

Of course the idea that The Mikado is racist certainly isn’t based on nothing. It’s not malicious, nor is it intended to represent what Japan is really like, but it’s based on the notion that Japan isn’t quite “real” and there’s no need to know anything about it apart from the superficial trappings. And yes, even though the use of the term “yellowface” is indiscriminate and at best debatable (a bit like the practice of darkening a performer’s skin to play Othello is inaccurately and ahistorically described as “blackface”), the use of makeup to make white actors “look Japanese” has uncomfortable associations with the worldwide tradition of a majority culture making fun of minorities, or taking roles that should have gone to minority actors (for example, the many white actors who played Charlie Chan). As you can tell from Gilbert’s disparaging references to blackface performers, The Mikado‘s makeup was considered very different from blackface or yellowface, since it lacked their caricatured mockery. But just because it was ahead of the curve for 1885 audiences doesn’t mean 2015 audiences see it the same way.

All of which means that if a Japanese-American doesn’t want to see The Mikado in a “traditional” production, no one could blame that person. But this was more than that: this was people who don’t want to see the play insisting that it should not be staged in that form for other people. And the people who enjoy the play are naturally not given the benefit of the doubt when they describe their own experience watching it. That they claim to understand that it’s not about Japan is just proof that they’re lying about, or in denial about, their own experience.

There’s a whole lot of mind-reading and gaslighting that goes on in this situation, where people who hate a work claim to understand it better than people who love it. I suppose sometimes that is true. But for example, people who dismiss Gone With The Wind as simply racist and pro-Confederate tend to understand it less well than the story’s fans, who also see the racism and pro-Confederate nostalgia, but also the feminist story of a potentially great woman warped by the society she was raised in, and the examination of what a society does after it’s been wiped out by a brutal war (which is just as brutal even if the society is the Confederacy or Nazi Germany). A white fan of The Mikado does not know what it’s like to be a Japanese-American watching it. Of the historical and social context of the play, the average fan probably knows more than the average non-fan. Sometimes people who don’t like a work might be entitled to have their own interpretation imposed on those who do, but it can’t be as simple as disliking the flyer.

This is a minor story, of course: a small company with a small audience that felt it necessary to pull its most popular show and rethink it. But it’s precisely because it’s such a minor story that it bothers me so much: people who didn’t want to see the production managed to get it taken away from a tiny sliver of people whose cultural preferences — 19th-century theatre in 19th-century style stagings (even bad ones) — are on the losing side in a very presentist culture.

The fact that it is a small company made it easy to punch down on. Disney’s Aladdin may be running on Broadway, an Arabian Nights fantasy full of white actors*, Orientalism and dubious Imperial associations — but it’s a big show from a big company, and no one pays attention to the complaints. The theatre has a terrible record when it comes to non-white actors and playwrights, but that’s going to take a long time to fix, if it’s fixable. But a 120-year old play with a unique reason for requiring this type of casting, performed by a company whose whole reason for existing is the link with 19th-century performance style: that’s an easy target. In an era when anything before the 1990s is considered old, there is no cultural penalty for attacking an old work and declaring your lack of empathy with its time period or its audience.

One of the many obvious arguments against what I’ve said is that marginalized groups now have a voice that they didn’t have before, and that the NYGASP now has to listen to complaints it could have ignored in the past. Its audience losing something it liked is a small price to pay. Perhaps. But everyone who tries to get a play shut down or revised thinks they’re doing it on behalf of the culturally marginalized. And people are rarely aware of their own power when they’re using it to shut down people who, in this particular situation, have less power.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/the-mikados-punishment-doesnt-fit-the-crime/feed/0Newsmakers of the day: William and Kate in the Big Applehttp://www.macleans.ca/society/will-and-kate-in-the-big-apple/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/will-and-kate-in-the-big-apple/#respondMon, 08 Dec 2014 16:47:39 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=649695New York City is in adoration overdrive. And the royals just arrived.

Newsmakers of the day: The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

There’s celeb royalty, and then there is real royalty. And New York is getting a very quick reminder of why the real deal always trumps Hollywood. The Kardashians may be pursued by tabloids, but they don’t face anything like the white-hot spotlight permanently focused on Prince William and his wife, Kate. The royal couple was met by a blinding barrage of flashes on their arrival at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, their stateside base for a quick three-day visit. They spent all of three seconds—perhaps six—travelling from car to door, with a moment for photographers to get a shot. Yet the networks went live with blanket coverage that focused on the closed door of the hotel. It was almost a flashback to the “Great Kate Wait” of 2013, when the media camped outside St. Mary’s Hospital, waiting for Prince George to be born. Beside filling airtime with banter—Is George coming? Nope, he’s with Kate’s parents. Will she wander down to Soho for a bit of shopping? Extremely unlikely, given the crushing schedule.

Until Monday and Tuesday’s back-to-back events, just about the only fun was betting on the colour of Kate’s coat. Most plumped for blue (I went wild, and thought grey). We lost. It turns out she wore a maroon bespoke coat “featuring a bouclé textured print and high scoop neckline,” said its design firm, Séraphine.” Then it was a quick change for a private dinner to thank the financiers who have contributed to their private foundation. This time, I should have bet big, because she keeps wearing the same basic outfit: a black lace dress. Think I’m exaggerating? I spent five minutes on What Kate Wore and found these: Nov. 13, Oct. 23. Also these from earlier, including the War Horse premiere (also seen here). She’s got enough black lace for a dedicated closet. It’s obviously a look she likes: She was modelling a tiny black lace number in 2002, when Prince William first noticed her. The rest, obviously is history.

There are plenty of events in the next two days. One hopes she has exhausted her black-lace enthusiasm.

Kensington Palace has released information about the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s programme ahead of their visit to the U.S.:

Sunday, Dec. 7
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrive in New York

Monday, Dec. 8
World Bank, Washington: The Duke of Cambridge will attend the International Corruption Hunters Alliance conference, followed by a working lunch. The Duke will be accompanied by Mr. William Hague. The Duke will give a speech at the conference focusing on corruption surrounding the illegal wildlife trade.

Northside Center for Child Development, Harlem: The Duchess of Cambridge, accompanied by the First Lady of New York City, will visit the centre, which fosters the healthy development of children and families by providing high-quality mental health and educational services. The Duchess and First Lady will take part in gift-wrapping with volunteers and will meet students undertaking a craft-making exercise.

Lunch at British Consul General’s Residence, New York: The Duchess of Cambridge will meet members of the British Community in New York from the culture, arts, hospitality and business sectors.

Conservation Reception at British Consul General’s Residence, New York: The Duke of Cambridge, accompanied by Secretary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, will attend a reception co-hosted by the Royal Foundation and the Clinton Foundation, in recognition of the conservation work carried out by Tusk and United for Wildlife partners: Wildlife Conservation Society; Conservation International; and The Nature Conservancy.

NBA Basketball game (Brooklyn Nets vs. Cleveland Cavaliers), Brooklyn: The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will attend an NBA Basketball game to support the ongoing collaboration between the Royal Foundation, United for Wildlife and the NBA.

Tuesday, Dec. 9
The National September 11 Memorial Museum, New York: The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will tour the National Sept. 11 Memorial Museum. Their Royal Highnesses will view one of the Memorial Reflection Pools and spend time in the Memorial Plaza and Memorial Museum.

The Door/CityKids, New York: The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will visit The Door to see the work they carry out in partnership with the CityKids Foundation. Both organisations offer services to young people to help them reach their potential. Their Royal Highnesses will tour the youth organization and view arts performances by the young people.

Creativity is GREAT Reception, hosted by NeueHouse, New York: The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will attend a reception at NeueHouse celebrating the wealth of British Talent in the Creative Industries based in New York.

Innovation is GREAT Reception, hosted by Shutterstock at The Empire State Building, New York: The Duke of Cambridge, accompanied by The Mayor of New York City, will visit the observation deck at the 86th floor, attend the technology-themed reception; and present the winners of the GREAT Tech Awards with trophies.

St. Andrews 600th Anniversary Dinner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will join this event, which will support scholarships and bursaries for students from under-privileged communities, new student sports facilities in St Andrews, investment in the university’s medical and science faculties and a lectureship in American Literature at St. Andrews.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/will-and-kate-in-the-big-apple/feed/0Buried Buffalo braces for two more feet of snowhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/buried-buffalo-braces-for-two-more-feet-of-snow/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/buried-buffalo-braces-for-two-more-feet-of-snow/#respondThu, 20 Nov 2014 09:08:14 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=642515A new blast of lake effect snow could leave some areas with more than 8 feet of snow on the ground – followed by flooding

]]>BUFFALO, N.Y. – A new blast of lake-effect snow began pounding Buffalo on Thursday, piling more misery on a city already buried by an epic, deadly snowfall that could leave some areas with more than 8 feet of snow on the ground when it’s all done.

But the meteorological “kick me” sign on the city hasn’t fallen off just yet. Forecasters say a rapid weekend warmup, with temperatures as high as 60 and heavy rain, could turn all that snow into floods.

“It is an extraordinary situation,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters after touring the region Wednesday and talking to truckers who had been stranded more than 24 hours on the Thruway. “It will get worse before it gets better.”

Even for Buffalo, a place that typically shrugs at snow, this was an epic snowfall – the kind of onslaught folks will be telling their grandchildren about.

The Buffalo area found itself buried under as much as 5 1/2 feet of snow Wednesday, with another lake-effect storm expected to bring an average of 2 more feet by late Thursday.

“This is an historic event. When all is said and done, this snowstorm will break all sorts of records, and that’s saying something in Buffalo,” Cuomo said.

The storm came in so fast and furious over Lake Erie early Tuesday it trapped more than 100 vehicles along a 132-mile stretch of the New York State Thruway that remained closed Wednesday.

Tom Wilson, of West Seneca, split a Salisbury steak frozen dinner with co-workers and tried his best to get some rest when he was stuck 36 hours at his warehouse job.

“I slept on a pallet. Then I slept on some office chairs, and then I went back to the pallet,” he said. “Then I found some sponges to lay on. I found one pack of sponges unopened. That looks like a pillow to me.”

“We tried to make popcorn with a two-by-four, two empty pop kegs, some charcoal and a dust pan,” he added. “It didn’t work.”

Bethany Hojnacki went into labour at the height of the storm and ended up giving birth in a Buffalo fire station after she and her husband couldn’t get to the hospital. Mother and daughter were later taken to the hospital in an ambulance.

Cuomo said Wednesday afternoon that all trapped travellers had been removed from their cars, though some truckers were staying with their rigs.

Asked by reporters how officials could allow people to be snowbound in cars for 24 hours, Cuomo cited a jackknifed trailer that prevented plows from removing fast-falling snow, and drivers’ own wrongheaded choices.

“What happened was, even though the Thruway was officially closed, people went on. We didn’t immediately block every entrance. It was a mistake,” Cuomo said.

“Part of it is citizen responsibility,” he added. “If the road is closed, it’s closed.”

The storm was blamed for up to seven deaths in western New York, at least four of them from heart attacks. Erie County officials said a 46-year-old man was discovered in his car, which was in a ditch and buried in snow 24 miles east of Buffalo. It was unclear how he died.

Sunny skies returned to some hard-hit areas Wednesday, but workers were still trying to cart off the acres of snow. Lake-effect snow fell heavily on some northern New York areas east of Lake Ontario.

With an additional 2 feet possible on Thursday, the one-week totals for the Buffalo area will approach the average snowfall for an entire year: 93.6 inches, or close to 8 feet.

The highest snowfall total for the Buffalo area this time was 65 inches, recorded in Cheektowaga. National Weather Service meteorologist David Church said forecasters haven’t determined yet how this storm ranks, but that 60 to 70 inches in 24 hours is probably in the top 5 for the region.

The heaviest 24-hour snowfall on record in the Lower 48 states is 75.8 inches, which fell at Silver Lake, Colorado, in 1921, according to the government.

The governor said it would take four or five days to clean up.

Amtrak passenger train service between Albany and the Buffalo area was suspended. Some of it will resume on Thursday. Mail delivery was interrupted in certain communities with driving bans.

The storm struck Buffalo on a day when temperatures dropped to freezing or below in all 50 states. At least a foot of fresh snow was expected in parts of Michigan through Friday, adding to deep snow on the ground.

Photojournalist Larry Towell needs about 10 years to finish a photo project. “It’s about focusing: having something to say, knowing what you’re going to say and taking the time it takes to say it,” he says, on the phone from his farmhouse in Lambton County, Ont. His Terrence Malick-like approach has left the 61-year-old with a short but extraordinary resumé focused on a handful of extensively documented subjects, including New York’s 9/11, El Salvador’s civil war and the war in Afghanistan.

Towell, the first Canadian member of famous international photographic co-operative Magnum, believes the road to memorable captures lies in method photography. “I try to become the people I photograph,” he says, adding that a great image tells a story not only by virtue of what lands in the frame, but also by the suggestion of what lies beyond it. “If you can take a photo through the eyes of your subject, you might transfer some clarity and empathy to the viewer,” he says, “and that’s doing quite a lot.” Documenting the devastation of 9/11 led Towell to Afghanistan. Those photos will be published this month in his compendium Afghanistan and exhibited at the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto.

Ground zero: A church minister stands amid the wreckage of New York’s World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks.

Lately, Towell has turned his attention to First Nations communities. For a man interested in conveying a sense of “landlessness” in his work, it seems a natural choice, but, as Towell explains, “It’s taken time for First Nations to open a door and invite solidarity. Idle No More was a catalyst,” he says. “Now I’m getting to work.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/need-to-know/noted-in-new-york-16m-in-unpaid-parking-tickets/feed/0NY police to get training on use of force after chokehold deathhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/ny-police-to-get-new-training-on-use-of-force-following-chokehold-death/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/ny-police-to-get-new-training-on-use-of-force-following-chokehold-death/#commentsMon, 08 Sep 2014 17:11:51 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=604215Training pledge comes following chokehold death of unarmed man this summer

Tomorrow-land: The 1964-65 World’s Fair and the Transformation of America

By Joesph Tirella

The 1964 New York World’s Fair isn’t as famous as the city’s previous fair in 1939, but, according to this book, maybe it should be. If the 1939 event was the last look at the world before the Second World War, then the 1964 fair turned up at the exact moment when the early ’60s were giving way to the late ’60s, and American culture would change forever. Throughout Tirella’s book, we are shown the contrast between the fair, an idealized version of a multicultural future in the optimistic spirit of John F. Kennedy, and the world outside the fair, where Kennedy was dead and a new, wilder era was taking shape.

The central figure of the book is the public-works mastermind Robert Moses, the architect of the fair and the man Tirella describes as “New York’s master builder.” He was determined to create a fair that would be profitable, unlike the one in 1939, and Tirella’s story is really the story of how he failed to achieve this goal, in part by creating an event that didn’t really keep up with the times. Though he eventually developed a certain affection for the Beatles, Moses fought to keep “cheap rock ’n’ roll trash” marginalized at the fair, instead hiring his friend Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians as the main musical entertainment: “He is also a favourite with many of the kids,” Moses insisted, “if not the wildest ones.” Like the fictional Don Draper on Mad Men, Moses comes off as a character unprepared to deal with the shift away from the sedate grown-up culture of the early ’60s and unwilling to embrace the teenager-oriented culture of the later years.

Perhaps too much of the book is devoted to unrelated ’60s events, such as Malcolm X and his split from the Nation of Islam. This can make Tomorrow-Land feel a bit thin as history: Tirella sometimes seems like an actual World’s Fair attendee, wanting to get away from the dull fare at the fair (including the Ice Capades) and into the more exciting world outside. Still, the portrayal of the fragmenting culture of the ’60s does help to explain why Moses failed in his goal of creating a fair that would appeal to everyone, at every time: The most famous ride of the fair was Walt Disney’s “It’s a Small World After All” which featured a world of international puppets, but, in the real world, that kind of trouble-free brotherhood was nowhere to be found.

]]>JERUSALEM – Israel on Monday recognized New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as the first ever recipient of the $1 million Genesis Prize, an award popularly dubbed the “Jewish Nobel Prize.”

The Genesis Prize Foundation said Bloomberg was honoured as the first winner for his long record of public service and philanthropy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will present the prize to Bloomberg early next year in Israel. Bloomberg will then announce to which philanthropic cause he will donate the money.

Bloomberg, whose third and final term as New York mayor is drawing to an end, said he was honoured to be the prize’s first recipient.

“Many years ago, my parents instilled in me Jewish values and ethics that I have carried with me throughout my life, and which have guided every aspect of my work in business, government, and philanthropy,” he said in a statement. “The Genesis Prize embraces and promotes those same values and ethics — a common thread among the Jewish people worldwide that has helped move humankind forward for centuries.”

Bloomberg beat out 200 other nominees for the prize, which the foundation said was established “to recognize exceptional human beings who, through their outstanding achievement, come to represent a fundamental value of the Jewish people — a commitment to the betterment of mankind.”

The prize is administered by a partnership that includes the office of the Israeli prime minister, the semi-governmental Jewish Agency and the Genesis Philanthropy Group.

Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, a member of the selection committee, said Bloomberg set a high bar for the new award.

“It is a great honour for the entire Jewish people to celebrate his achievements, his commitment to improving the world, and in particular his city: New York,” Wiesel said. “We are certain that his selection as the recipient of the Genesis Prize will serve as an inspiration to young Jews and others across the globe.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/israel-awards-new-york-mayor-bloomberg-1-million-prize-dubbed-jewish-nobel/feed/0Will Montreal finally get its champion?http://www.macleans.ca/politics/why-montreal-wont-get-the-champion-it-needs-for-its-next-mayor/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/why-montreal-wont-get-the-champion-it-needs-for-its-next-mayor/#commentsFri, 04 Oct 2013 14:30:00 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=428174Martin Patriquin on the challenges ahead for a city brought to its knees by corruption

Mobsters stuffing cash into their socks, city managers on the take, two mayors in a row driven out of office, the first by revelations of seedy campaign financing, the second by allegations of outright fraud. Montreal, you might say, is having its New York circa 1970s moment: a beautiful, vibrant city brought to its knees by corruption, shabby government and the politics beyond its own borders.

We know what eventually happened in New York: successive mayors, first Ed Koch, then David Dinkins, began the gruelling cleanup of the city before superhero corruption fighter Rudy Giuliani swept in and the city’s fortunes soared. The moral of the story would seem simple: any city with good bones, and Montreal certainly has that, can go from the doldrums to new heights, given the right person at the top.

So with a municipal election looming—one that mayoral candidate Richard Bergeron calls “Montreal’s most important election in the last 25 years”—is this the moment Canada’s second-largest city will finally get its champion? There’s certainly a lot at stake for Montreal’s next mayor, set to be elected Nov. 3. He or she will oversee two mega-hospital projects; the revamping of much of the city’s major highways and transportation corridors; the replacement of the ailing Champlain Bridge; and the launch of one of the largest real estate development projects in the city’s history. All while grappling with the grinding corruption many say has become ingrained in Montreal’s governance.

But if there are similarities between the Montreal of today and the New York of three decades ago, there is also one key difference. While Giuliani, like all New York mayors, held enormous political power over the city he governed, Montreal suffers from a radically decentralized system of governance that has spawned a dizzying tangle of bureaucracy. Worse still, over time this mishmash structure has leached power from the mayor’s office to the benefit of Montreal’s 19 boroughs. “Montreal has made itself unmanageable,” says Stephen Leopold, a Montreal real estate magnate who worked for years in New York City.

It is perhaps why the slate of candidates vying for mayor don’t inspire Giuliani-style change. The presumptive front-runner, Denis Coderre, is a six-term Liberal MP who oversaw the Quebec wing of the federal Liberals during the party’s dark days of the sponsorship scandal. His team is largely made up of politicians from Union Montréal—the very party alleged to have raised thousands in illegal donations, according to testimony at Quebec’s corruption inquiry.

Also in the running is Marcel Côté, a successful businessman who has nonetheless hitched his electoral wagon to a coalition made up of sovereignists he himself spent his career deriding. There’s Bergeron, a three-time mayoral candidate of the left-leaning Projet Montréal and noted 9/11 “truther.” The pack is rounded out by Mélanie Joly, a 34-year-old political neophyte; and Michel Brûlé, an anti-English pamphleteer.

To be clear, Montreal’s fortunes aren’t nearly as dire as what New York faced back then—or even as grim as many in the city tend to think they are now. And change is still possible. But precious few cities the size of Montreal have undergone the kind of renaissance needed now without a powerful mayor at the helm. It begs the question: is such a thing even possible?

If, as Franz Kafka once wrote, “every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy,” consider what several bureaucratic attempts to revamp Montreal have wrought on Sherbrooke Street when the city’s main east-west artery is buried under snow.

Sherbrooke Street’s continuous 31 km passes through six city boroughs, each with its own snow-removal crews and budgets, with several Kafkaesque oddities along the way. The downtown boroughs of Ville-Marie and Plateau-Mont-Royal are divided by University Street. After every snowfall, pedestrians and motorists alike can watch the cumbersome dance of each borough’s snow clearing machinery as it trundles into the side streets of downtown Montreal in what amounts to a giant, arbitrary U-turn.

Sherbrooke also runs through three of Montreal’s 15 demerged cities, the residents of which decided in 2004 they wanted no part of the amalgamated Montreal. These, too, have their own crews—and don’t coordinate their activities, snow clearing or otherwise, with the city.

Snow clearing, like garbage collection and sewage treatment, is the most elemental of municipal responsibilities. As the Sherbrooke Street exercise shows, the city has managed to complicate what should be a straightforward task. It isn’t entirely Montreal’s fault; its system of governance was foisted upon the city by successive provincial governments in what urbanist and professor Gérard Beaudet calls “improvisation and more improvisation, along with a soupçon of bad faith.”

How exactly Montreal became “a Swiss-cheese mess,” as Concordia University professor Harold Chorney once described it, stems from a confluence of the merger mania trend of the late 1990s, and the perpetual language battles familiar to anyone who calls Quebec home. In 2000, the Quebec government, led by the Parti Québécois, instituted the merger of nearly 50 Quebec towns and cities, Montreal included. As with Toronto before it, the main reason was to cut costs.

Many of those former towns and municipalities on the island of Montreal couldn’t bear being forcibly merged with the city—particularly at the hands of a sovereignist government. So prior to the 2001 municipal election, Montreal mayoral candidate Gérald Tremblay proposed a grand solution to keep them happy: each municipality would remain a city unto itself, with a mayor and council with full hiring, taxation, borrowing and legal powers. It wasn’t enough. Despite winning the election, Tremblay, by then mayor, lost 15 former towns to demerger referendums in 2004.

Today, the island of Montreal now has nearly as many merged boroughs (19) as demerged cities. Amalgamated Montreal has four levels of government (borough councillor, borough mayor, municipal councillor, municipal mayor) comprising 105 elected representatives—nine more than Toronto and New York City combined. In 2011, the team at the satirical television show Infoman attempted to chart the structure of Montreal’s government. The results took up nearly an entire wall of a cavernous Radio-Canada recording studio.

Montreal is also a member of the 31-member agglomeration council, a cobbled-together mélange of Montreal’s boroughs and demerged towns; it deals with things like property assessment, public transit, social housing and wastewater treatment. Yet another governmental structure, this one including the island of Montreal and the off-island suburbs flanking the city, is responsible for virtually the same issues as the agglomeration council.

The end result? “Montreal’s mayor has less power, and it’s hard to have a global vision for the city when you are in constant competition with other city and suburb mayors,” says Daniel Gill, a professor of urbanism at Université de Montréal. “Montreal is a lot like its hockey team. Les Canadiens were once great, but they haven’t won the Stanley Cup in a long time. Likewise, we are becoming just an ordinary city as a result, not the international city we once were.”

Montreal’s decentralized borough system has its fans, notably Luc Ferrandez, the borough mayor of the Plateau-Mont-Royal. First elected in 2009, Ferrandez has upended many a status quo in the upwardly bohemian quarter. Under his leadership, several streets have been narrowed to incorporate bike paths, while others have had their traffic reversed, if only to stymie the thousands of suburbanite commuters rolling through the Plateau en route to downtown every day. A fleet of electric cars was made available, snow removal reduced to save money and shrink carbon footprints, while artist studios have been protected from the ravages of real estate speculation. “None of this would have been possible at a city level, because these decisions required risk and political courage, which is much easier if you are dealing with 100,000 people and not 20 times that,” Ferrandez says.

Perhaps, but many others argue such perks in the boroughs need to be weighed against the more serious problems facing Montreal. For more than a year, Montrealers have stood restlessly by as testimony from Quebec’s inquiry into its construction industry detailed long-running price-fixing schemes amongst many of the firms doing business with the city, both in construction and snow removal. Many of those same firms, the inquiry heard, gave prolifically (and illegally) to Union Montréal, the party of three-term former mayor Gérald Tremblay. (Tremblay says he was unaware of any illegal fundraising within his former party.)

As well, several key city managers admitted to taking bribes to fast-track construction projects and approve false contingency payments—all of which, of course, ultimately came out of the Montreal taxpayer’s pocket. What role, exactly, decentralization played in allowing corruption to fester is a matter of debate; as Ferrandez points out, the illegal fundraising and price-fixing schemes mostly took place at the city, not at the borrough, level. Yet a strong and effective mayor would arguably lessen the likelihood of this happening again.

But if a powerful mayor is what’s needed to tackle corruption and the entrenched bureaucracy, the status quo—a weak mayor presiding over a balkanized city—suits the Quebec government just fine. According to columnist and author François Cardinal, whose recent book Réver Montréal (Dream Montreal) dissects and offers solutions to Montreal’s ailments, the last thing Quebec City wants is a unified metropolis to the southwest. Think of the power that mayor would wield had iconic mayor Jean Drapeau’s dream of a truly united Montreal come true: today, he or she would speak for the province’s primary economic engine and the roughly two million people who live here—a quarter of the province’s population. “Montreal is seen as a threat to Quebec’s power. Ever since Drapeau, each government has been worried about Montreal having too much,” Cardinal says. “The city was always kept down to make sure it never got too big. Quebec’s Anglos and immigrants are concentrated here, so the tendency has been to dilute its power, to steamroller it so that it resembles the rest of the province.”

As a long-time Liberal stronghold, the city is either taken for granted by Liberal governments or given up as lost by Péquistes. Regardless of which government is in power, politicians of both stripes would rather pursue the vote-rich suburban ridings around the city, Cardinal says. He points to the Metro extension to the northern suburb of Laval, announced by the provincial government in 2002, even though a heavily populated eastern swath of the island remains unserved. “Montreal is basically under a soft trusteeship of the provincial government. The city has too many masters, and the mayor is but one manager among many,” says Cardinal.

Contrary to popular belief, whoever is elected mayor of Montreal next month isn’t inheriting a lost cause. Corruption within the construction industry has been curbed, thanks largely to the long-running inquiry into the subject. Housing sales are strong. Culturally, the city is as teeming as ever. A recent New York Times article highlighted its vibrant film industry, as well as three consecutive Oscar nominations given to movies by three Montreal-based directors.

Perhaps most notably, the city has a lower crime rate than even present-day New York City—and Toronto, for that matter. “Montreal is actually working despite itself,” says Christian Savard of the pro-urbanism group Vivre en Ville. “The number of cranes on the horizon is up, the number of vacant lots is down. There is no urban decay. The population is stable. Maybe it’s time we stop tearing our hair out over our government and work with what we have.”

But challenges remain. As Montrealers long for a champion, they need not look as far as New York. Montreal’s Drapeau was a nebbish technocrat whose culinary tastes extended only to his beloved cheese and crackers. Yet his nearly three decades in power were marked by the very renaissance Montreal so badly needs today. The city flourished under his watch, from the Metro to Expo 67 to a revitalized downtown core. Part of his secret was to sweat the details. “Montreal’s most successful mayor in the 20th century drove around the city at night to find potholes and had the vision to dream by day. He rallied Montrealers like no mayor in history. That’s what it is going to take,” said Stephen Leopold.

Even if there is a game-changing Drapeau candidate amongst the current slate of mayoral candidates—and that is a big if—he or she will be hemmed in by competing powers in the boroughs, and where the relatively simple act of removing snow from city streets is a bureaucratic feat. Even Drapeau himself might not have been up to the task.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/why-montreal-wont-get-the-champion-it-needs-for-its-next-mayor/feed/19Bloomberg touts NYC’s post-9-11 revival, warns of continuing potential for terrorismhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/bloomberg-touts-nycs-post-9-11-revival-warns-of-continuing-potential-for-terrorism/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/bloomberg-touts-nycs-post-9-11-revival-warns-of-continuing-potential-for-terrorism/#respondThu, 12 Sep 2013 15:14:25 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=422008NEW YORK, N.Y. – New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is touting the rebuilding efforts at the World Trade Center site — and all of Lower Manhattan — in the…

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/bloomberg-touts-nycs-post-9-11-revival-warns-of-continuing-potential-for-terrorism/feed/0Last parts of 1 WTC spire to be raisedhttp://www.macleans.ca/general/last-parts-of-1-wtc-spire-to-be-raised/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/last-parts-of-1-wtc-spire-to-be-raised/#respondThu, 02 May 2013 11:14:02 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=379646NEW YORK, N.Y. – The final pieces of the spire that will top One World Trade Center — and make it soar to a symbolic 1,776 feet when fully installed…

]]>NEW YORK, N.Y. – The final pieces of the spire that will top One World Trade Center — and make it soar to a symbolic 1,776 feet when fully installed — are scheduled to be raised up to the building’s roof.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey says the pieces are scheduled to be lifted to a temporary work platform on Thursday morning. They will be installed at a later date.

The 408-foot spire will serve as a world-class broadcast antenna.

The new tower is at the northwest corner of the World Trade Center site, which is well on its way to reconstruction with the 72-story Four World Trade Center and other buildings.

The raising of the pieces was originally scheduled for Monday, but was postponed because of weather issues.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/last-parts-of-1-wtc-spire-to-be-raised/feed/0Canadian company helps World Trade Center’s ascent to new heightshttp://www.macleans.ca/general/last-pieces-of-1-world-trade-center-rising-to-make-skyscraper-tallest-in-western-hemisphere/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/last-pieces-of-1-world-trade-center-rising-to-make-skyscraper-tallest-in-western-hemisphere/#commentsMon, 29 Apr 2013 22:41:03 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=378022NEW YORK, N.Y. – One World Trade Center, the skyscraper that replaces the fallen twin towers in New York City, is about to receive the last pieces of its crowning…

]]>NEW YORK, N.Y. – One World Trade Center, the skyscraper that replaces the fallen twin towers in New York City, is about to receive the last pieces of its crowning spire, a 124-metre structure built in part in Canada.

Once the spire is installed, the 104-story highrise, already New York’s tallest building, will be just feet from becoming the highest in the Western Hemisphere.

Officials had hoped that would happen Monday, but the weather did not co-operate and it was postponed due to high winds. The event will be rescheduled when conditions permit.

The new tower’s crowning spire is a joint venture between the Montreal-based ADF Group Inc. engineering firm and New York-based DCM Erectors Inc., a steel contractor.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey says the spire pieces and a steel beacon will be lifted at a later date from the rooftop to cap the building at 541 metres.

Installation of the 800-ton spire began in December, after 18 pieces were shipped from Canada and New Jersey.

The spire will serve as a world-class broadcast antenna.

With the beacon at its peak to ward off aircraft, the spire will provide public transmission services for television and radio broadcast channels that were destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, along with the trade centre towers.

Overlooking the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the highrise is scheduled to open for business in 2014.

The tower is at the northwest corner of the site, which is well on its way to reconstruction with the 72-story 4 World Trade Center and other buildings.

Monday’s postponed celebration of the reconstructed trade centre was to come days after a grisly reminder of the terror attack that took nearly 3,000 lives: the discovery of a rusted airplane part wedged between a nearby mosque and an apartment building — believed to be from one of the hijacked planes that ravaged lower Manhattan.

As officials prepared to erect the spire, the office of the city’s chief medical examiner was working in the hidden alley where debris may still contain human remains.

The tallest building in the Western Hemisphere is the Willis Tower in Chicago. The world’s tallest building, topping 823 metres, is in Dubai.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/last-pieces-of-1-world-trade-center-rising-to-make-skyscraper-tallest-in-western-hemisphere/feed/3Ed Koch, former mayor of New York, dead at 88http://www.macleans.ca/general/ed-koch-former-mayor-of-new-york-dead-at-88/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/ed-koch-former-mayor-of-new-york-dead-at-88/#commentsFri, 01 Feb 2013 12:28:47 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=345516[View the story “New Yorkers wake up to the news of the loss of Ed Koch” on Storify]
New Yorkers wake up to the news of the loss of Ed…

]]>RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – The investment firm headed by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal says it has sold a majority stake in The Plaza Hotel in New York to a major Indian real estate conglomerate in a $575 million deal.

Kingdom Holding Co. says it will retain 25 per cent equity ownership in the landmark hotel, now controlled by a group led by Sahara India Pariwar. A statement Tuesday said Kingdom Holding made $32.9 million profit on the deal.

The 115-year-old Plaza has 282 hotel rooms as well as condominium units and retail space.

Kingdom Holding is a major shareholder in Citigroup and holds stakes in other companies, including News Corp., Apple Inc. and Twitter.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/saudi-group-sell-majority-stake-in-new-yorks-plaza-hotel-in-575m-deal/feed/0Spire for 1 WTC making its way to New York City by barge from Canadahttp://www.macleans.ca/general/spire-for-1-wtc-making-its-way-to-new-york-city-by-barge-from-canada/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/spire-for-1-wtc-making-its-way-to-new-york-city-by-barge-from-canada/#respondFri, 23 Nov 2012 08:49:20 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=318530NEW YORK, N.Y. – The giant spire that will top 1 World Trade Center is making its way to Manhattan from Canada.
The spire is divided into 18 sections that…

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/spire-for-1-wtc-making-its-way-to-new-york-city-by-barge-from-canada/feed/0‘In an uncertain world’http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/in-an-uncertain-world/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/in-an-uncertain-world/#commentsFri, 28 Sep 2012 15:21:27 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=297982The text of the Prime Minister’s speech last night in New York. Colin Horgan quibbles with Mr. Harper’s understanding of the War of 1812.“Thank you very much Rabbi Schneier, …

“First, I want to begin by thanking Henry Kissinger for that generous introduction.

“I have to say Dr. Kissinger, I am of course aware not only of your immense contributions to your country and international relations, but I have long been an admirer.

“I have to tell you, I have been an admirer indeed since before I was old enough to vote.

“So being able to share the stage with you and to be introduced really does mean a great deal to me.

“I’m also, of course, honoured and want to thank Rabbi Schneier for the fact that we are all here tonight.

“I don’t just refer to this large and impressive gathering, but more particularly to the cause for which you have brought it together and have brought it together for so many years.

“In a globe of conflicting and complex and competing interests, it is far too easy to set aside the silent and subtle appeals of the conscience.

“But, if we do, the world is lost.

“You have made it your life work to take the horrors of your own experience and to use them to remind us of something truly hopeful: the freedom and human dignity of every person.

“And so you have our admiration and our appreciation!

“Ladies and Gentlemen, it is upon this foundation – of freedom and human dignity – that Canada seeks, in an uncertain world to articulate a foreign policy built on certain principles.

“These principles are rooted in our own country’s ancient heritage and long practice of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

“But it is more than that.

“On foreign affairs, there is a widely shared consensus among Canadians, a generosity of spirit that one might describe as a simple desire for fair play.

“We Canadians, for example, are very conscious of our own sovereignty and we expect our governments to make pragmatic decisions in Canada’s national interest.

“But we also want those governments to be good world citizens, to try to understand other points of view and to act in concert with our partners, for the wider interests of humanity.

“That is, of course, not the same thing, friends, as trying to court every dictator with a vote at the United Nations or just going along with every emerging international consensus, no matter how self-evidently wrong-headed.

“When confronted with evil in the world, we do take a stand, we take strong, principled positions in our dealings, whether popular or not.

“And that is what the world has counted on from Canada – and received – in two world wars, in Korea, in a generation of peacekeeping operations, Gulf War One, and of course, most recently in Afghanistan and also in Libya.

“Finally, I came to tell you that Canadians are proud, fiercely proud, of the reputation we have established for both a competitive economy and a compassionate society, and for the unparalleled combination of cultural diversity and harmony which draws to us people of all nations.

“In short, ladies and gentlemen, I come here tonight to accept your award, not for any qualities of my own, but on behalf of the unique and magnificent country that I have the privilege of leading.

“Among the many assets of Canada is its neighbourhood.

“That is to say that Canada has only one real neighbour, and it is the best neighbour any nation could possibly have.

“Now Rabbi, we do remember that 200 years ago this year began the last war between our two countries, the war that effectively established our independence.

“That our comparatively small country has since lived in secure peace and growing prosperity for almost two centuries is a testament to the enduring strength and the essential benevolence of the United States of America.

“So thank you for our great partnership and for your unwavering friendship.

“And, friends, allow me in this vein to offer you, let me offer you our unequivocal condemnation and outrage over the recent anti-American riots around your embassies and the deadly attack upon your consulate in Libya, and the deep sympathies of the Canadian people for all who lost friends and loved ones in that violent event.

“And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings me to want I want to do tonight which is a brief reflection on the state of the world in which we live and the state of our values in the world in which we live.

“I referred a few moments ago to our uncertain world.

“What are the uncertainties and what are their consequences?

“The years through which we are now passing seem to be times of extraordinary change, as if some great hand is spinning the wheel of history.

“Nations with a history of shared values, like many of our friends in Europe, are weighed down by debts they cannot seem to control, by entitlements they can no longer afford, and by sluggish economies that show few signs of growth.

“Meanwhile, new powers are rising, whose commitments to our ideals are often neither firm nor clear.

“What appears to some a hopeful spring for democracy quickly becomes an angry summer of populism.

“Old resentments seem to come back to life, energizing groups who advocate terror and dangerous, rogue states seek nuclear weapons.

“Of course, these great global changes often present us global opportunities.

“The world is probably a freer and more democratic place today when I look at it than at any point in my lifetime.

“Yet, paradoxically, rarely has the future of the free and democratic world been less secure.

“As I said, some new powers are neither sure friends nor implacable foes.

“Because these are perhaps the most difficult, the hardest to evaluate, I will not elaborate on them here other than to say, it is ever important in interacting with them that we clearly understand and always remember what we are dealing with.

“Other countries, however, constitute unambiguously a clear and present danger and thus demand a very sober assessment.

“First among these is the Government of Iran.

“I speak not merely, friends, of its appalling record of human rights abuse or its active assistance to the brutal regime in Syria, or its undeniable support for terrorist entities, or its continued denial of diplomatic rights, or its pursuit of nuclear weapons, rather it is the combination of all these things with a truly malevolent ideology that should concern us.

“I believe that the appeal of our conscience requires us to speak out against what the Iranian regime stands for.

“Likewise, it requires us to speak in support of the country that its hatred most immediately threatens, the State of Israel.

“Now friends, in supporting Israel, we don’t sanction every policy its government pursues.

“When, however, it is the one country of the global community whose very existence is threatened, our Government does refuse to use international fora to single out Israel for criticism.

“And it is important to state, that whatever Israel’s shortcomings, neither its existence nor its policies are responsible for the pathologies present in that part of the world.

“And we are also mindful of an lesson of history, that those who single out the Jewish people as a target of racial and religious bigotry will inevitably be a threat to all of us.

“Indeed, those who so target Israel today are, by their own words and deeds, also a threat to all free and democratic societies.

“Now friends, I say these things not to counsel any particular action, not to wish any additional hardship on the long-suffering Iranian people and certainly not to advocate war, but rather so that we not shrink from recognizing evil in the world for what it is.

“Our Government simply contends that the international community must do more, must do all it can, to further pressure and isolate this regime.

“Ladies and gentlemen, let me just conclude with this.

“We should never consider others evil merely because they disagree with us or because they compete with us.

“But where evil dominates, you will invariably find irreconcilable disagreement with the ideals that animate Canada, America and like-minded nations, the ideals which assert that all people possess human dignity and should be accorded equal rights.

“It is not for Canada to lecture others, but it is the responsibility of our Government to make the choices that circumstances force upon us, and these are the choices we shall make.

“First, we shall choose our friends well.

“And our true friends are those who to their core both respect the will of their majority and the rights of their minorities.

“Second, we shall deal openly and fairly with those who may not be our friends, but we will not deceive ourselves about those relationships.

“And we shall not sacrifice our guiding principles in the interests of some transient advantage.

“Third, we shall endeavour to recognize clear and unequivocal threats and we shall speak out against them when they stand before us.

“And finally this, for ourselves, we shall strive to manage our own house, our economy and our finances, in such a way that our own freedom of action is not compromised.

”Because we must remember that the ideals for which we stand may be invaluable, but they are not invincible.

“They require our countries to be vigilant and well governed.

“And they require us to forever impress their privileged nature upon our successive generations.

“We therefore must hold on to them ourselves and teach them to our children.

“We must speak of democracy in our schools.

“We must praise freedom as we go out and justice as we come in.

“We must value our institutions and their endurance.

“And we must cherish the individual rights for which our ancestors bled and inscribe upon our hearts, the vision of citizens who know what it is to live without fear.

“For in the end, that is the mark of liberty.

“My friends, if we do these things, our nations shall endure and shall continue to inspire others.

“And those of us to whom leadership has been entrusted will have done all that can be expected of them.

“Thank you very much for having me, for the honour you’ve extended, for your invitation this evening.”

]]>The Scene. John Baird stood and waved to the crowd. The Prime Minister had just identified Mr. Baird as the Canadian official who will be addressing the United Nations this week and the Foreign Affairs Minister—with Mr. Harper still speaking, mind you—rose in his spot and welcomed everyone’s recognition and adulation.

Alas, Thomas Mulcair was not reassured by the promise of Mr. Baird’s presence. “Mr Speaker, he’s busy photocopying his speech at the British embassy,” he chided.

Once more, the NDP leader pressed this matter of the Prime Minister’s agenda for the week. “Two years ago, the Conservative government lost Canada’s bid for a seat at the UN Security Council, a first in Canadian history,” he continued. “This week, the Prime Minister turned down an invitation to speak at the UN general assembly, even though he is already scheduled to be in New York. Has the Prime Minister given up on Canada’s role at the UN? We are merging our embassies with Great Britain, is our delegation to the United Nations next?”

This did not quite convince the Prime Minister to reschedule. “Mr. Speaker, as I just said, never under any government has it been the practice of Canadian prime ministers to speak every single year at the United Nations general assembly,” Mr. Harper offered. “The Minister of Foreign Affairs will be speaking this year. I am sure he will do a very good job.”

Mr. Baird put his hand on his chest and mimed as if flattered.

“That said,” Mr. Harper said, “nobody in Canada doubts, whether they agree with us or not, that the government takes strong, clear and independent decisions on foreign affairs.”

So there.

(Mr. Harper is quite right that there is no recent tradition of prime ministers making annual addresses to the general assembly. But Paul Martin did manage to do it twice. And Jean Chretien spoke five times in ten years. And Brian Mulroney spoke three times in just less than nine years. Mr. Harper has addressed the assembly twice in just under seven years. So if this is a competition of some kind, Mr. Harper is not winning. Unless you take a dimmer view of the UN, in which case, like golf, the lowest number wins and Mr. Harper has the lead going into the clubhouse.)

Speaking of clarity, the NDP’s Paul Dewar sought more of it.

“Mr. Speaker, let us get this straight,” Mr. Dewar suggested, “the Prime Minister will be in New York on a taxpayer-funded trip to get some personal goody, yet he will not even travel across town to speak to the United Nations.”

There was some grumbling from the government side at this “goody” remark.

“World leaders are gathering this week to discuss the world’s most pressing issues, but our Prime Minister will not be there,” the NDP’s foreign affairs critic continued. “Does the minister understand that foreign affairs is about doing the hard work of engaging the world?”

“Ohh!” sighed the Conservatives mockingly.

“It is not about making the Prime Minister feel special,” Mr. Dewar concluded.

Mr. Baird now stood to repay Mr. Harper’s kind words, invoking the honour Mr. Harper could not reference himself. “Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister will be in New York. He will be meeting with a number of colleagues to discuss the important issues of the day. He will also be accepting the statesman of the year award by a very well respected group,” Mr. Baird reported.

The Conservatives gave this a standing ovation.

(It is tempting to point out that Jean Chretien managed to both accept the same award and address the general assembly in the same year—two weeks apart, to be precise—but let’s not get too caught up in the minutiae of prime ministerial scheduling.)

“I say to all members of the House,” Mr. Baird said, “every single Canadian can be proud of the principled foreign policy and the leadership of our Prime Minister.”

Mr. Dewar seemed not quite to be bursting with pride. “Mr. Speaker, I guess the Prime Minister expects our new roommate, the British prime minister, to do the speech on his behalf,” he mocked, here demanding that the Harper government table before Parliament any co-habitation agreement with the Brits.

Undeterred by yesterday’s clunker, Mr. Baird now attempting a daring bit of creative equivalency. “I do find it passing strange that the critic for the NDP seems to be encouraging us to have vibrant diplomacy with Iran,” he mused, “but is somehow scared of us having diplomacy with the United Kingdom.”

The Conservative side appreciated this.

Bob Rae, having sat in the corner and waited for his turn, had a quip at the ready when he was finally called on.

“Mr. Speaker,” he said, “I hope the Prime Minister can pick up the Fossil of the Year awards that are still waiting to be claimed by the government.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-commons-the-ndp-concerns-itself-with-stephen-harpers-agenda/feed/4REVIEW: Mr.Broadway: the inside story of the Shuberts, the shows, and the starshttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-mr-broadway-the-inside-story-of-the-shuberts-the-shows-and-the-stars/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-mr-broadway-the-inside-story-of-the-shuberts-the-shows-and-the-stars/#commentsMon, 14 May 2012 15:39:17 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=258090Book by Gerald Schoenfeld

]]>Schoenfeld’s memoir of his decades as a Broadway producer was published posthumously (he died in 2008), but even if he were alive, it would seem like a missive from a lost world of theatre showmanship. Originally a lawyer for the powerful theatre owner J.J. Shubert, Schoenfeld and his partner Bernie Jacobs took over the Shubert Organization in 1972, when Broadway theatre was in a death spiral that mirrored the collapse of New York City: theatregoers were driven away, he writes, by “unsafe streets littered with trash and all kinds of hustlers and criminals.”

Schoenfeld tells us how he and Jacobs helped turn this around by vertically integrating their business: instead of just booking shows into their theatres, they began to produce and invest in the plays. Part of their strategy was to lure “young as well as minority audiences” to Broadway, starting with ’70s smashes like Pippin and A Chorus Line; another part was campaigning for “the revitalization of Times Square,” making New York more attractive for tourists. Much of the book from that point on is a catalogue of hits, from British-invasion shows like Amadeus and Phantom of the Opera to cult favourites like Sunday in the Park With George and The Goat.

Because Schoenfeld was not known as a particularly colourful producer, the book doesn’t abound in juicy anecdotes; the closest he comes to anger is when he complains at length about Nine beating his hit Dreamgirls for the Tony Award. But Schoenfeld helps us understand the business of Broadway and how backward it can be; theatres didn’t even take credit cards until he came along. And he calls attention to the neglect of Broadway by the city and state governments, which subsidize film and TV instead. The “I Love New York” campaign of the ’70s boosted theatre revenue, but “inexplicably, it was not repeated.” Still, the book provides some hope for Broadway: if Schoenfeld helped revive it when it was dead once before, someone else might come along to revive it again.

Imagine you had $4 million to spend on a new downtown home. In New York, one of the world’s great cities, you could buy a three-bedroom, 2½-bathroom apartment on the edge of Central Park. If you were feeling more frugal you could move a couple of blocks away and snatch up a penthouse with a full view of the park for less than half the price, $1.5 million.

Or you could spend the money on a three-bedroom, four-bathroom suite at the Residences at the Ritz-Carlton with a full view of . . . Toronto. A two-bedroom, two-bathroom suite in the same building costs as much as that New York penthouse, and a survey of the Multiple Listing Service shows over 100 condos in Toronto selling for $1.5 million or more.

The multi-million-dollar New York price tags for some condos in Canada’s biggest city speak to a dangerously overheated market, say some observers. In Ontario, construction of multiple urban units (which mostly means condo buildings) was up a staggering 50 per cent in March from the previous month. In Toronto alone, there are nearly 48,000 units under construction. In 2011, the city counted 132 residential high-rises under construction—more than New York, Chicago, Miami, Boston and Dallas combined. Later this year, that number is expected to reach 189, according to housing market analyst Ben Rabidoux.

For some, the cranes that have taken over parts of the city skyline are a sign of a large unmet demand for housing, driven by a growing population and urban policies meant to constrain the city’s horizontal development in favour of building upward. Others, though, see a bubble market that is headed for a bust. In the first three months of this year, resale prices for condominium apartments have fallen for the first time since 2009, says Rabidoux, adding: “It’s potentially a disaster waiting to unfold.” If that happens, a few buyers will no doubt regret spending New York prices for a Toronto condo. But at least they’ll have the bragging rights of a Ritz-Carlton address—and plenty of bathrooms.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/a-million-dollar-view/feed/2Here’s a free course that could get you hiredhttp://www.macleans.ca/work/jobs/heres-a-free-course-that-could-get-you-hired/
http://www.macleans.ca/work/jobs/heres-a-free-course-that-could-get-you-hired/#commentsTue, 10 Jan 2012 18:41:45 +0000http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/?p=35688Nearly 300,000 have signed up so far

On Monday nearly 300,000 people received an e-mail containing their first free lesson in computer coding from New York based Codeacademy.

The course is part of their “Code Year” initiative where anybody and everybody is encouraged to make their New Year’s resolution to learn computer programming in 2012. By the end of it, students will be able to build their own apps.

Coding is a valuable skill in today’s economy. The federal government reports that Computer Programmers and Interactive Media Developers are in high demand in some Canadian cities, such as Montreal, where their average wage is $34.50 per hour, and Winnipeg where their average wage is $25.47.

Codecademy was launched in August by Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, recent Columbia U. graduates. They planned to move to Silicon Valley to start a technology company, but Sims, a political science major, didn’t know how to code. The books and programs they found didn’t make it easy. So the pair started Codeacademy, which uses online interactivity to teach the masses.

Codeacademy told the New York Times that they will eventually charge to match coders with jobs.

Thank you, Mr. Johnston. Merci beaucoup. Thank you to everybody. Greetings to Consul General Prado, to Consul Generals Lopez and Scanlon, to Senator Wallin, to Commissioner Castro, to Mr. Stewart, to of course so many members of our protective services, and of course families and friends of those whose memory is honoured here today.

As Prime Minister of Canada, it is my honour to accept the offer to include in this beautiful place an official commemoration of the Canadians whose lives were taken so cruelly ten years ago today. On behalf of the people of Canada, I thank her Majesty, the Queen, and I thank Mr. Stewart, Mr. Johnson and the officers and directors of the trust for this gracious gesture. We warmly welcome the decision to also include here other Commonwealth countries, and we support wholeheartedly the plan to rename this garden the Queen Elizabeth the Second Garden to reflect this decision. It is fitting that the Canadians who perished on 9/11 should be remembered here, alongside the Britons, Australians and other Commonwealth citizens who were also killed in that atrocity.

In the global conflicts of the past century, our countries have been champions of freedom together. On September the 11th , 2001, together we were attacked by the enemies of freedom. Their primary targets that day were our American cousins, but as we have seen in London, Bali, Madrid, Mumbai, and let us not forget Toronto, where the plotters were thwarted, we are, all of us, in their sights. All of us, but especially innocent civilians. And it is the innocent who we honour here today. To you who mourn their loss most profoundly, to their family and friends, I offer my respects and condolences and my hope that you find on this day at this place and in this ceremony some measure of comfort.

At your initiative, we are pleased to have designated this day in Canada as a National Day of Service. Just as Canadians welcomed American travellers grounded on that terrible day, just as both countries remember still these simple acts of decency, let us take this solemn anniversary as an inspiration to serve selflessly to do good for those around us. In the shadow of the evil of September 11th , 2001, we must not forget our capacity for goodness, and our knowledge of what is right, which is written in the hearts of all men.

Yes, September 11th, 2001, lives were taken in an act of heartlessness beyond words. But in response, lives were given, freely, nobly, and acts of courage beyond compare. Brave Canadians in the company of other heroes among our friends and allies have made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan. They have helped ensure that that country is no longer a safe haven for those who plot to kill the innocent half a world away. Let us honour our fallen countrymen also in our reflections today. Let us offer our praise and thanks to their colleagues and to our law enforcement and intelligence personnel, and to the countless others who work each day to keep us safe. And let us renew our resolve that no more dates on the calendar should become symbols of the wounding of a nation.

For if we are to honour the innocent, we must not only remember them. We must remain vigilant to protect all those they left behind and to thwart all those who would do them harm. This unceasing effort is our government’s most solemn duty. Together with our friends and allies, we are committed to carrying out that duty in the hope of a more secure and peaceful world. Thank you all for being here today. Merci.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/we-must-remain-vigilant/feed/1Leave tiramisu alone!http://www.macleans.ca/general/leave-tiramisu-alone/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/leave-tiramisu-alone/#commentsThu, 01 Sep 2011 15:59:40 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=210424Stijn Nieuwendijk/Flickr
Florence Fabricant wrote about a disturbing new food trend in the New York Times dining section recently: people are messing around with traditional tiramisu by adding new stuff,…

Florence Fabricant wrote about a disturbing new food trend in the New York Times dining section recently: people are messing around with traditional tiramisu by adding new stuff, like lemon and berries, to it.

I know. I’m panicking too. Fabricant reports that a new specialty shop that serves six variations of the classic Venetian dessert has just opened up on Christopher Street in Manhattan. And get this: a similar-themed spot also opened up not too long ago in the motherland itself (Milan, specifically).

Now, I’m not necessarily opposed to flavour variations. For instance, I like all kinds of ice cream besides vanilla (especially mint chocolate chip and pralines and cream.) However when it comes to particularly iconic recipes, I get a bit fussy. And that includes tiramisu, the origins of which are unclear. Some say it was invented around 1971 (either in Sicily or Treviso, depending on whom you ask). Other accounts suggest it’s been around even longer. Apparently wives of Italian soldiers fighting in WWII used to load their husbands up with the boozy, caffeinated confection before they hit the fronts. Don’t scoff: it makes sense–tiramisu literally means, “pick me up.” And it certainly does just that with its espresso and liquor-soaked ladyfinger cookies layered between mascarpone custard and topped with cocoa.

I bet those men didn’t complain that their tiramisu didn’t have ganache on it.

I know, I’m being close-minded. Wild blueberry tiramisu topped with meringue is probably not terrible. I just don’t like messing around with perfection. But I am getting better. Why, just a few weeks ago I sampled a piece of rhubarb pie with strawberries. It certainly wasn’t as good as straight-up rhubarb pie, but it wasn’t half bad.

When it comes to playground safety, New York isn’t taking any chances. In June, police ticketed two women eating doughnuts on a bench inside one of the city’s public playgrounds; another doughnut-eating pair on a nearby bench also received tickets. The quartet, who had bought their snacks from a cramped doughnut shop across the street, had broken the same municipal law as a group of seven men who were ticketed last winter while playing chess at another playground. They disobeyed a sign posted at the entrance, forbidding adults from entering—part of the city’s measures to safeguard kids. “It’s pedophile panic,” says New York writer Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids and host of new reality show Bubble Wrap Kids, which will debut this winter. “We think everyone is a pedophile until proven otherwise.”

While the doughnut eaters will have to appear in court this summer to learn their punishment, other U.S. cities, including Miami Beach and San Francisco, also have measures in place banning adults from entering public playgrounds unless they are accompanied by a child. Though Pocatello, Idaho, doesn’t have such measures, it shares in the spirit: in July, after witnessing an older man snapping pictures at a playground, a mother angrily confronted him and chased him away. The police were alerted along with the local news, which issued a detailed description of a “suspicious man spotted taking pictures of children,” driving a “tan/brown van.” Shortly after, the man in question called the police and identified himself. He had been photographing his grandson; the only reason he left, he added, was because a woman was yelling at him.

The playground restrictions mirror similar measures instituted at other children’s venues, including libraries, some of which bar unaccompanied adults from entering the children’s book sections. At one Pennsylvania library, even parents face constraints: it prohibits adults “unaccompanied by their children” from using the restroom. And last year, an elderly Florida couple drove 160 km to visit the Miami Children’s Museum, but without kids, they weren’t allowed in. Some museums do allow adults to enter, but only under certain conditions: the Boston Children’s Museum states that “adults unaccompanied by children must provide proper photo identification (i.e., driver’s licence or passport).” That’s even for events likely to interest mostly adults, like this summer’s Wizard of Oz exhibit.

These sweeping anti-pedophile measures are occurring at a time when U.S. violent crime is falling rapidly, including crimes against children. Between 1990 and 2005, sex crimes against children dropped 51 per cent, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. A recent Gallup poll, however, revealed that 74 per cent of Americans believe crime is getting worse, suggesting, perhaps, a reason for the panic. That’s bad news for doughnut eaters, chess players and, some might argue, children. “When you start treating everyone as evil, you can’t have community,” says Skenazy. “I for one would want a couple of women sitting in a playground. That’s an extra set of eyes.”

After enduring the Spider-Man musical, which is neither good nor bad-good enough to warrant more words than these, we wandered through Central Park toward the Guggenheim Museum. It was time to get the kids some culture.

That’s a thing we’re supposed to do as parents: expose our children to “culture.” Enough of this having fun and enjoying everything we’re doing, kids—it’s time to walk slowly past some old stuff.

At the Louvre last summer, our family and every other tourist in Paris had the idea of heading straight for the Mona Lisa when the museum opened. At first we all walked casually. But the competitive instinct kicked in. Soon we were race-walking. Grown men were throwing out their elbows and grunting. Our boys charged ahead, weaving through the fading old ladies. They don’t remember anything about the painting but still talk about how they blew past a large Italian family on the final turn before the salon.

This summer, the Guggenheim is devoting much of its space to a retrospective of Lee Ufan, who is a very important “artist-philosopher” according to the noted authority, Sign I Read On a Wall.

Our first exposure to his work was a painting made up of a long brush stroke along each of the four sides of an otherwise bare canvas. And there on the floor: a boulder placed at either end of two long pieces of metal. We walked on. Another canvas, this one with a few small squares of grey paint. Another boulder, this one with a metal pole leaning against it.

It was at this moment that I learned something I didn’t know about the Guggenheim. I learned that the Frank Lloyd Wright design ensures the human voice reverberates when spoken at anything more than a murmur. This is especially true if the human voice is that of a 12-year-old boy saying too loudly: “This is all a big pile of junk.” Meanwhile, our 10-year-old was silently contemplating the possibility that leaving behind his snack wrappers after watching TV makes him not a slob but an artist-philosopher with a provocative view on human consumption.

We did nothing to halt the critique of Lee’s oeuvre. When having culture inflicted on you, it’s important to realize that art can be beautiful or bogus, magnificent or nonsense, and that you don’t have to marvel over a couple of rocks just because some tour guide claims they represent “a durational form of coexistence between the made and the not made.”

Feeling left out? On the Guggenheim website, you can watch a video of Lee lifting a boulder and dropping it on a sheet of glass. Make sure you listen to the curator emptying her Roget’s in an effort to depict this as the genius gesture of a master artist. Clearly, she missed the groundbreaking work I did in the 1980s with a baseball and a kitchen window.

Over decades of museum and gallery visits, I have developed a foolproof theory related to art: the more impenetrable and pretentious the quotes about an artist’s work, the greater the likelihood that the art is going to be pretty ridiculous.

We stopped to learn about Lee’s minimalism. The artist himself was quoted: “If a bell is struck, the sound reverberates into the distance. Similarly, if a point filled with mental energy is painted on a canvas, it sends vibrations into the surrounding unpainted space.” The phenomenon, he says, causes the viewer to fall silent and “breathe infinity.” “You can’t breathe infinity,” said Will, our youngest. “It wouldn’t fit in you.”

Lee’s work suggests that each of us is one paragraph of flamboyant prose away from being an artist. That coffee ring you just left on the table? Your spouse would call it “an eyesore” and wipe it away. A savvy art agent would call it “a self-initiated rebellion of the hand and awareness of the coffee table as an infinite unknown” and get you an exhibition at the Whitney.

The Lee Ufan exhibition concludes with a site-specific installation featuring “a single, broad, viscous stroke of paint on each of three adjacent walls of the empty room.” The curator described it as establishing “a rhythm that exposes and enlivens the emptiness of the space.” James, our oldest, described it as “something he probably did in four minutes because he needed money.”

You don’t need to love high-speed dubbing (or know what it is), to enjoy this documentary. Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest is an engaging, dramatic portrayal of iconic hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest, even if it sometimes feels like a big screen version of MTV’s Behind the Music. Brought to you by first-time director and actor Michael Rapaport, Beats is a collage of concert footage, backstage drama and present-day interviews with ATCQ members, as well as an impressive roster of well-known musicians, all set to a satisfying soundtrack of the group’s hits.

First, let’s get the controversy out of the way: this doc was released amid a kerfuffle between Rapaport and his subjects. The band, who were initially supportive, ultimately disagreed with Rapaport’s direction. Half of them didn’t show up to the L.A. premiere. Band member Q-Tip went so far as to voice his lack of support over Twitter. The hate seems to have died down a bit, though, after Q-Tip has explained himself and Rapaport has said that they’ve agreed to disagree. Okay, let’s move on to the film.

In 1985, A Tribe Called Quest was formed by a group of teenagers from Queens who called themselves Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Jarobi and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Their flavour of danceable, conscious hip hop caught on in a big way, influencing other bands and ultimately earning them a reputation as hip hop pioneers. In one interview, Pharrell Williams stresses how artists like himself and Kanye West wouldn’t be where they are today without ATCQ.

As far as narratives go, it’s a familiar one in the music world. Band does well, band soars to fame, band fights, band breaks up, band reunites for practical reasons. Q-Tip and Phife are the group’s Lennon and McCartney. At one point during their reunion tour, they have it out in a pre-show backstage fight while the cameras are rolling. Phife appears to feel that Q-Tip is too controlling, as well as insensitive to his health problems. Phife, we learn, has Type 1 diabetes, and is plagued by an addiction to sugar. On the whole, he’s portrayed as the lovable, albeit chronically underprepared sidekick. Q-Tip, on the other hand, comes off as a steely, somewhat callous frontman. At one point, he admits to having “no qualms” about performing ATCQ hits after Phife has left the group. While the health plotline appears central to explaining the band’s demise, it also feels as if the two have simply outgrown each other.

When we meet the group in present day, over 25 years after their formation, the magic has definitely faded. Phife seems more interested in his new basketball scouting gig and Q-Tip appears invigorated by his solo career. The reunion comes across as contrived and bizarre—Japanese fans wave homemade “Linden Blvd.” signs (that’s a street in Queens) in an overflowing Tokyo stadium while the band bounces to its old hits—and it feels like some of the big questions are left unanswered. Is international stadium-pleasing ATCQ’s fate? Will they record another album? (Rapaport notes that they still owe Jive Records one album.) Are Phife and Q-Tip jiving again or just begrudgingly cooperating to make some money? Perhaps the doc just needed a couple more years to let the story continue to unfold.

Regardless, the film is a visual and aural feast. Rapaport creates a gorgeously stylized homage to the colours, sounds and images that typify hip-hop’s Golden Age. The graphic illustrations and moving photo montages evoke the attitude of the ’80s hip hop era without encasing it in glass. Whether this is the end of ATCQ or just the kick in the pants they needed—remains to be seen.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/authors/brian-d-johnson/a-clashing-tribe-called-quest/feed/1Leadership moments in New Yorkhttp://www.macleans.ca/general/leadership-moments-in-new-york/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/leadership-moments-in-new-york/#respondMon, 27 Jun 2011 16:59:32 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=199110Back in September 2010, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took a position in favour of building a mosque near Ground Zero and, in so doing, joined a highly emotional…

]]>Back in September 2010, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took a position in favour of building a mosque near Ground Zero and, in so doing, joined a highly emotional debate that swept the nation. He didn’t back away when the controversy became a national one, taking a principled stance as mayor of the city that was the subject of an unspeakable terrorist attack. This was a leadership moment.

Since January 2011, New Yorkers statewide have been treated to a similar series of leadership moments by recently elected Governor Andrew Cuomo, particularly with respect to his negotiations with the state’s unionized employees.

With a slow recovery and serious deficit and debt issues forcing many states to downsize and question existing collective agreements and benefits, many governors have opted for confrontation with state employees. States with newly elected Republican governors, such as in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida and New Jersey, have taken a harder line. The results have been mixed and the ideological divide with labour unions has not been more acute in decades.

Cuomo opted for a different approach with NYS unions, one based on negotiations between partners with an upfront acknowledgement by the governor that the status quo was untenable and he expected concessions. The result has been a model of good governance, a balanced budget and the creation of a climate for constructive change.

Just this weekend, history will record the passage of the same-sex marriage bill by the New York legislature as a great victory for those who saw it as a civil rights issue. The message will resonate across the country at a time when polls are showing majority support for same-sex marriage. Despite the increasing public acceptance, there remain significant bastions of resistance among religious and political leaders. For Cuomo to succeed, it took daring, determination, and principle.

Leadership has many definitions and is exercised in different circumstances. In politics, two of the strongest tests of leadership involve getting your political base to make concessions that involve giving something up that is dear to you. The second is to stand on principle and bring about transformational change in the society you are called upon to lead.

Observing Bloomberg and Cuomo up close lends credence to the belief that principle, respect, and the courage to do what is right can still be a winner in this age of focus group testing and media consultants.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/leadership-moments-in-new-york/feed/0Aritzia joins fashion’s big leagueshttp://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/the-fashion-big-leagues/
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/the-fashion-big-leagues/#respondFri, 17 Jun 2011 15:10:54 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=197189The Canadian retailer takes the ultimate test: a flagship store in the heart of New York City

It’s been three years since Vancouver’s Aritzia LP took its repertoire of feminine, fashion-forward wares south, but next week’s opening of its flagship store in New York marks the boutique’s official coming out to the U.S. market. The successful execution of the clothing retailer’s 50th location is crucial, given its plans for a wider expansion in the U.S. Hot on the heels of the June 15 opening is another store launch in August in neighbouring New Jersey.

The two-storey New York store’s prominent corner location at Broadway and Spring Street in fashion haven SoHo has Aritzia rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names in the industry, from J.Crew to Prada. It’s a move that puts the firm in a better position to attract attention from prospective landlords, fashion media and tastemakers, says retail analyst and DIG360 Consulting principal David Ian Gray. “There are lots of retailers seeking prime spots in prime locations, and because Aritzia is coming in as an unknown entity, they’re having to fight that fight much like they did when they started out in Canada.”

But the company has little reason to be intimidated: Aritzia boasts some of the highest average sales per square foot amongst retailers in North America. And while it doesn’t reveal specific sales numbers, the private company earns somewhere between $200 million to $300 million each year, says Aritzia’s vice-president of marketing Sally Parrott.

Its numbers are similar to those of fellow Vancouver-grown retail success story Lululemon, Gray says. But while the yoga-wear giant offers a distinct product, many of the styles and brands Aritzia offers can be found elsewhere. Its secret? Aritzia, established in 1984, has carved itself out a niche by maintaining a higher price point without moving into the luxury brand category, and resisting the urge to use lower-quality materials like other retailers that target young, style-conscious women have done. “They’re not racing with everyone else to offer cheaper and cheaper product,” Gray says. “They keep their price up where it has a little bit of cachet.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/the-fashion-big-leagues/feed/0Toronto’s war on funhttp://www.macleans.ca/general/torontos-war-on-fun/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/torontos-war-on-fun/#commentsTue, 14 Jun 2011 13:35:41 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=196237If only we could shrug it off as a quirky hangover from its Victorian origins

You can interpret a city’s ambitions by the face it presents to the world. When it comes to Toronto, its streets fretted with bars called Harlem and Brooklynn, the skyline spiked by condo developments with names like The Manhattan, and the Legoland imitation Times Square installed at the corner of Yonge and Dundas, it is clear that the city wants to be New York. Which is funny, because there are few large cities in the world that are less like New York than Toronto. Where New York is dense and chaotic, Toronto is sprawling and orderly. New York has endless canyons of stunning architecture, while Toronto’s flat streetscapes look like they were designed by blindfolded six-year-olds. And while New York is resolutely devoted to upholding its rep as the city that never sleeps, Toronto wages a relentless war on fun.

Let’s start with an old favourite, the municipal ban on ball hockey on city streets. Every Canadian kid plays street hockey, but only in Toronto is it a furtive activity, occurring under the reproachful gaze of signs declaring “Ball and Hockey Playing Prohibited.” Defenders of the bylaw argue it is harmless because it is so seldom enforced, and that trying to get rid of it might cause more problems than it solves. But that misses the crucial point, which is that it is a fundamental principle of a free society that what is not explicitly prohibited is permitted. A city that feels the need to prohibit many things is one that deep down does not trust the citizens with their freedom.

It isn’t only homegrown pastimes the city finds objectionable. Last summer, Toronto became one of the few jurisdictions on Earth—along with the Taliban regime that terrorized Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001—to prohibit kite flying in a park. The ban was a response to complaints about debris left from kite-fighting competitions held by members of the city’s Afghan and South Asian communities­—the leftover string was apparently disrupting lawn mowing and fouling trees, and there were concerns that some of it was embedded with glass shards that could endanger birds. A year later, city officials are trying to come up with a compromise. Part of the proposed solution involves a prohibition on “competitive kite flying in parks that have significant bird activity,” though the definition of “significant” remains unresolved. At any rate, it doesn’t appear to concern anyone that the freedom to fly a kite without being harassed by petty little officials was one of the reasons many of these people moved their families thousands of kilometres away from their homelands in the first place.

But this chintzy nickel-and-diming of pleasure in the city of Toronto is blind to colour or creed. Two years ago, a community group took over an abandoned shack in Christie Pits that had an old oven in it, and started hosting impromptu neighbourhood pizza nights. The city’s response? Pay a $100 fee for a permit and cough up money to pay a city staffer to watch over things.

This was pretty much the same approach the city took in February, when organizers of a youth group in Toronto’s immigrant-heavy Jane and Finch neighbourhood thought it would be fun to host a skating party at a local rink, complete with cookout and hot chocolate with marshmallows. The event was seen as a way of helping teens from places like Somalia and Cambodia get accustomed to the leisure rituals of their new country. It too was kiboshed, after the city demanded the group spend $80 applying for a permit and then purchase $2 million in liability insurance.

Now that the warm weather has arrived, Toronto’s war against fun has drawn new targets. Hence the recent denial of a permit for Afrofest, the African cultural festival that has been held in Queen’s Park for the past 23 years. Then there is Mayor Rob Ford’s assault on street art, which recently saw a squad of jihadis from the city’s Ministry of Boring erase a mural that the artist says the city paid him $2,000 to paint in the first place. Finally, there is the ongoing battle over restaurant patios. Officially, every patio in the city has to be closed down by 11 p.m., but some are allowed to remain open till 2 a.m. It varies from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, depending entirely on the whim and whimsy of the local strongman on city council.

It would be nice if we could just shrug this off as a quirky hangover from the city’s Victorian origins. But much as it seems to wish it were otherwise, Toronto isn’t a colonial backwater anymore; it is one of the largest cities in North America, and one of the most culturally diverse in the world. Indeed, it might be precisely because of that diversity that city officials are so afraid of fun. After all, every culture defines fun in its own distinct ways, and if you allow a free-for-all of fun, who knows what sort of problems might ensue. But this is the sort of gambit that is guaranteed to backfire: preventing South Asians from flying kites, or Somalis from having a skating party, is exactly the sort of overweening cultural paternalism that hinders new groups from properly integrating.

Ultimately, people flock to the great cities of the world—Paris and London, Hong Kong and New York—because they are places where anything is possible, and everything is up for grabs. “The city is a competition,” as some Frenchman once wrote. But if Toronto is a competition, then city officials are dedicated to ensuring it’s the only one in the world where everyone loses.